Last year I attended the annual NANPA (North American Nature Photography Association) summit where one of the breakout sessions was concerned with “The Ethics of Subject Welfare: Animals, People, and the Land.” If you’ve ever been to a NANPA summit you know that there is an a...
Photography is a critical element in the conservation toolbox. It allows conservationists to cut across the boundaries of illiteracy and indifference that isolate people from our fundamental kinship and obligation to nature. Photography can ignite the spark that moves people into action. The rel...
I can’t speak for other photo contests, but the Images for Conservation Fund (ICF) Photo Contest is a grueling one-month endurance test. It’s really two months if you consider the one-week preparation, one-month shoot, and three weeks of sorting through and processing the images. Aft...
by Carl Donohue | March 1, 2008
Have you ever told anyone that you’re a natural resources photographer? I haven’t. I’ve also never mentioned to a passer-by that I was taking pictures of commodities or assets or units. My point concerns the importance of language, and how it shapes our perceptions and our acti...
by Joe Smith | December 1, 2007
This follow up article is based on my experiences in the 2007 Coastal Bend Wildlife Photo Contest, the world’s third richest photo contest. A now all-digital contest, there are other noteworthy changes in the contest format. For basic information about the contest, please see Conservation...
While photographing the breeding cycle of Common Terns on a local lake during 2005 I discovered that none of the hatched chicks survived to fledge. As this did not bode well for the survival of the colony, I decided to see what could be done for the following season.
If you want to put in 18-hour days getting up early and getting to bed late with no TV or newspapers while photographing and downloading in between, sign up for a competitive photo contest.
In April 2006 I spent 30 consecutive days photographing nature on a Texas Hill Country ranch along with...
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All of us hear the conservation message repeatedly—preserve what we have or it won’t be there for the next generation, right? I’m sure most of you educate yourselves on what you can do. You learn about your subjects before photographing them, use low-impact techniques to reduce ris...
The concept of conservation photography has been proposed out of the need to make a distinction between the creation of images for the sake of photography, and the creation of images to serve the purpose of conserving nature.
by Joe Smith | December 1, 2005
My first Coastal Bend Wildlife Photo Contest in 2001 was my introduction to nature photography and photographing on ranches in Texas. As a recently retired businessman living in Houston, Texas, I knew nothing about wildlife and habitat and had little experience in taking nature slide images, eit...
Introduction by Heather Forcier
Almost a year ago we received correspondence from a new organization looking to promote conservation through use of private lands to lease for nature photography – the Images for Conservation Fund (ICF).
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More than any other animal the tiger stands out as the defining symbol of wildlife in the Indian sub-continent. As commonly known, the tiger once thrived all over India, but what is not known is that with the ascendancy of the British Raj, the tiger was considered to be vermin, and the slaughter...
