Wildlife Photographer of the Year. A review.

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Wildlife Photographer of the Year is an exhibition in collaboration with the Natural History Museum in London showcasing photos in a competition to find the picture or pictures to determine the ‘wildlife photographer of the year’ or the ‘young wildlife photographer of the year’.

The exhibition is being shown currently at the National History Museum in London but is also being shown at many local museums dotted around the UK. I saw the exhibition in Brighton Museum – wedged in between Jubilee Library, the pier, the Royal Pavilion and Old Steine.

To keep as evidence that I went to the exhibition, I bought postcards at the shop, picked up leaflets in the library and outside the museum and even kept my train tickets on the day.

After seeing the exhibition, I learnt that wildlife photography isn’t just bland and dull photos of animals, but photos that take and have effect and have thought, time and interest funnelled into them.

Sailing By © Matthew Smith (Australia)

What could be improved? Not much, I suppose! For me it was a calm, relaxing and interesting experience – the staff were happy, content and helpful and all was well. My only recommendation for improvement would be a better choice of postcards – when I looked there were only three different images from the exhibition. There should also be more of a choice of leaflets. Apart from that, it was a 9 out of 10 trip for me.

I would recommend this highly to anyone with a good sense of photography, knowledge and/or understanding of photos as it would interest those to no end.

If I had specific people I could recommend this exhibition to, it would be people from my photography club. This is due to the fact that this exhibition sports a highly exquisite collection of taxidermied animals such as birds; eagles, hummingbirds, ptarmigans, capercaillies and many more other interesting, taxidermied animals such as turtles. It also sports a wonderful collection of skeletal artifacts. Many pictures include sunsets and night time scenes as well as many images that they would love, due to the effects; mild distortion and long exposures which my friends are thoroughly interested in. The images have amazingly-put titles some of which include ‘Big Daddy’, ‘Sailing By’, ‘The Mouse, The Moon and The Mosquito’ and ‘Beach Guardian’. My favourite of which include ‘Beach Guardian’ – a goliath of a tree shrouded in fog with its glorious roots just dipping above the mist.

Alfie

Alfie has been working with Photoworks and Brighton Youth Centre to do a Silver Arts Award