The comedy wildlife photographer awards — A photo of an infant lion in Tanzania, and a leap of faith to take a picture of Africa’s Great Migration
The winners of the Comedy Wildlife Photographer Awards included a salmon punching a bear in the face and a penguin with no head.
The organization fields thousands of submissions for each of its photo categories: creatures of the land, creatures of the air, creatures of the sea, a junior award for photographers 18 years old or under, an internet portfolio award, and a people’s choice award.
The overall winner of the January 2021 contest is a photographer from Texas who took a picture of an infant lion tumbling out of a tree.
“What you can anticipate is potentially something happening so you want to position yourself in the way you think that animals will move, where the light is, how that’s going to affect the speed of your camera,” Hadley said.
Hadley will receive a handmade trophy from the Wonder Workshop in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, two photography bags, and a one-week safari in Kenya. There, she hopes to capture the great migration, in which millions of zebras, wildebeests and gazelles roam across the Serengeti during the dry season in search of fresh grass and water.
Despite taking home the top prize, Hadley had only recently begun to pursue photography full time. She left her corporate job in order to focus on photography. She called it a leap of faith.
I have a good job, well paid, and it’s what I’ve done for my whole career so it was a bit scary. She said that she was scared to try something different because she didn’t know if she could do well on a professional level. “I thought, if not now, when?”
Catching a salmon by jumping on a fours and running off with a woman in the Serengeti, and raising awareness around wildlife conservation
A picture of a salmon punching a bear in the face at the foot of Alaska’s Brooks Falls was captured by John Chaney, a businessman and photographer of over 50 years.
From late June to September, mature salmon make an arduous upriver journey from the ocean to the gravel beds of their birth to spawn every two to three years. Over 200,000 to 400,000 salmon leap the waterfalls every year, according to the National Park Service.
“Wherever wildlife is happening, you try to stake out a good spot and you just take pictures for hours trying to get the best image, whether it’s a unique facial expression or an animal doing something unique to make the picture special,” he told NPR.
A photograph that was captured by a woman in the Serengeti, fought off competition from thousands of other photographs.
“No one expected this to happen and of course we were concerned about his safety, but luckily as cats do he righted himself just in time and jumped on all fours and ran off with his siblings.” A happy ending for a hapless kitty who didn’t quite know how to get down from a tree.”
As well as providing some light-hearted fun, organizers want to raise awareness around wildlife conservation. According to the press release, 10% of net revenue will be donated to the Whitley Fund for Nature — a UK charity that supports conservation leaders working in their home countries across the Global South.
The picture of a heron oblivious to the wide jaws of a hippo yawning behind it won the Creatures of the Air Category Award for Jean Jacques Alcalay, while Arshdeep Singh won the Think Tank Photo Junior Category for his shot of an owl inside a pipe.