One of my images has been selected to be on display in an exhibition by Norfolk Wildlife Trust (NWT).
My competition entries
About three months ago, my daughter Chloe passed on an advert she spotted from Norfolk Wildlife Trust (NWT) promoting a Nature Photography competition and encouraged me to enter.
I went through my collection and picked a few images that I wondered whether they would be worthwhile to enter.
Taking a quick peek at the terms and conditions, images had to be from NWT sites so after looking through the NWT sites, I quickly paired up images to locations and further narrowed down the shortlist.
I quite liked these two from Buxton Heath, confirmed as an NWT site.
I was a little gutted then because on closer inspection of the T’s and C’s, it said images had to be taken in the last year.
This left me with two images as below.
The two images above were taken last August (2024) at Pigneys Wood and Alderfen Broad which I have my wife Kathryn to thank as it was her idea to visit these reserves to explore some new NWT locations.
I know the second image isn’t wildlife but I was taking creative license to view the purple needlegrass (at least that’s what I think it is via Apple’s attempt at Plant recognition) as nature.
The fly shot was bagged after wandering around Pigneys Wood near North Walsham. I spotted the fly sat static and got my lens as close as I dare without disturbing it and tried to use sensible settings and used manual focus.
I had not considered the shot for a club competition as I thought a judge may criticise the lack of focus on the wings of the fly – to achieve that would need a focus stack.
After submission I thought no more about it.
Notification of image selection
In early September, I received an email which said my fly image had been selected from hundreds of entries to feature in their Nature Exhibition at Cley during the month of October.
I was advised not to share or promote this achievement until the winners were announced end of September.
I was unsure from the email if I was in the finalists for potential winning or not so probably got carried away with myself there.
Results
The winners have now been announced (see here) and it’s great to see a fellow Norwich & District Photographic Society (NDPS) member Alan Dixon be announced as the winner – well done Alan!
NDPS has recently started a Nature and Wildlife special interest group and I already knew Alan and his passion, skill and experience in photographing wildlife so no surprise to see him win.
It all about Me
So, in the context of this blog being mostly if not exclusively about me, me, me… let’s ask the question that needs to be answered.
What have I achieved?
Well, the image below will be one of 59 other highly commended images on display in the Norfolk Wildlife Exhibition at Cley Marshes throughout the month of October.
There were 1,100 entries into this competition so to get into the last 62 effectively means my image made to top 5% of entries, which is a great achievement.
Naturally I am proud of this achievement.
The exhibition at Cley is on show throughout October and likely coming to Norwich or another NWT reserve somewhere in the county thereafter.
Reflections
For an image of mine to be recognised, and especially in the genre of wildlife which is something of a secondary genre to my main one of landscapes / seascapes is pretty good.
I thought my image, and indeed all of them in this exhibition were really good quality and noticed that NWT have printed on boards rather than what we see all the time at club competitions and exhibitions which is the traditional mounted prints.
The boards looked really good and I thought my fly image looked really good. I would imagine the boards are cost effective to produce and easy to mount and dismount.
NDPS Nature and Wildlife Critique
I had just submitted this image for our club’s new nature and wildlife group critique evening in early October.
The group really enjoyed the image and congratulated me on capturing it and it featuring in the NWT exhibition.
The group recommended if I had the opportunity again, a narrower aperture would be recommended to try and get the wings in focus, which I totally agree with.
I shall continue whenever possible to photography wildlife and see where that and more macro shooting can take me.
A second visit
I revisited the exhibition with Kathryn and my Dad on 18th October which was lovely.
It was good to visit again and I had a lot longer looking around all the images and spotted Alan’ winning fox cubs shot on the front of the NWT 2026 calendar.
Onwards and upwards…