Hello everyone, I hope you’ve had a great festive break in December and Happy New Year to you all.
Alongside two other staff members, I had the pleasure of judging the entries for the Winter Wildlife Photo Competition (which ran at the Uni on all of our sites throughout the whole of December 2023).
We had 7 entrants with multiple images. To make the judging fair, we judged each entrant on the entirety of the portfolio submitted, be they one or multiple images.
The first-place winner of the 2023/2024 Winter Wildlife Photo Competition is Melanie Stanton.
The judges were impressed with the composition of each of her shots and the clarity of her images from Kingston Hill. It was really hard to choose one overall images as the winning shot from her entries, as each of us was drawn to a different one. Melanie provided a description for each of her entries which are listed below – let us know which of these are your favourite in the comments.
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| First place images from Kingston Hill by Melanie Stanton |
Entry 1:"Robbie, the office robin": We started noticing him in November, flitting around the area between the Business School and the Frank Lampl building, we'd see him in the shrubbery, around the benches or in the central walkway, narrowly avoiding people's feet. I set up a window feeder to help him survive the winter and this is the one entry I took with a "proper" camera, rather then a mobile phone. Taken on December 20th
Entry 2 "The Art of Bio-Degradation": I come into campus via the rear Robin Hood gate and on the morning of 15th December there was a nice sunrise. On a good morning I'll often take a detour up to Coombehurst to look for photo opportunities, but this morning I noticed this decaying leaf hanging from a branch just inside the gate and knew that photographing it from behind would allow the light to illuminate its pattern, so took out my mobile phone and snapped this.
Entry 3 "Fungis to be with": On the afternoon of December 20th, the sun had come out so I'd decided to one last walk around campus to see if there were any final subjects worth snapping. I stopped at the Memorial Garden and upon looking down noticed these tiny drab bonnet mushrooms (i think) so got down on the ground to capture them from below.
The second-place winner of the competition was Nadia Townshend, who looked to present a macro view of the habitats and wildlife at Penrhyn Road campus. As a collective, these felt the second strongest of the entries from a composition point of view. The judges liked seeing this different aspect of the campus including the more abstract, but very Christmas-y feeling composition.
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| Second place winning images from Penrhyn Road by Nadia Townshend |
We had other wonderful entries, including wildlife spotted around our sites which I’ve added below. And of these, the honourable mention of the competition goes to Kevin Hiscox, with his wildlife spot at Roehampton Vale…we did feel that it might be hard to verify the spot outside of the matrix😉
but it definitely inspired smiles to the start of the new year which is a good start to a year in anyone’s books.
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| Our Honourable Mention choice - the wildlife of Roehampton Vale by Kevin Hiscox |
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| Wonderful images of the trees at Kingston Hill by Sarah Geard |
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| A great capture of our resident Heron by Marissa Collins from the Knights Park Campus |
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| With more wonderful bird life caught on camera at Penrhyn Road with this lovely Woodpigeon amongst holly berries by Mohammed Khan... |
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| ...and a lovely composition of angles and light with with more bird life caught on high on the Town House Building by Cassie Woodhouse |
Our two winners will be getting their prizes of amazon vouchers for £30 and £20 soon.
I’ll be running this competition in the 2024/2025 academic year too. Next year we will run the competition for the entirety of January 2025; and if that proves popular, for the 2025/2026 academic year, we’ll run the competition in February 2026 (so if the pattern holds, we’ll be back to January in 12 years time (I do like being prepared 😊)!).
So start looking around our campuses this month to plan your entries for next years competition to get an edge!
And don’t forget, if you enjoy looking out for wildlife, why not take part in the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch surveys taking place at the end of January across all our sites – you can sign up for them on our
Eventbrite page here – more preparation for the competition next year 😉
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