The Nature Conservancy organisation has just announced the winners of its 2019 Photo Contest, and the selected shots are a collection of truly stunning images that remind us of how breathtaking our planet can be.
A global organisation dedicated to preserving lands and waters, each year the Nature Conservancy organises a photo contest open to all applicants from around the world to pick the best shots in five categories - Cities and Nature, Landscape, People and Nature, Water and Wildlife, as well as the Grand Prize overall winner.
“The natural world inspires a sense of wonder in all of us,” said the chief marketing officer of the Nature Conservancy, Richard Loomis. “These photographs are a powerful reminder of the importance of sharing our vision of nature”. More than 120,000 entries arrived this year from 152 countries around the globe, and they were all carefully examined in the Nature Conservancy’s headquarters.
The Grand Prize went to Tyler Schiffman for a beautiful underwater shot of a sea lion taken in California’s Monterey Bay. “I had framed this shot waiting for a sea lion to swim bay,” said Schiffman. “I took three photos and as rare as it was the moment left in a blink of an eye”.
For each of the five categories, the Nature Conservancy announced the winners of the first, second and third prize as well as some honourable mentions. American Jay Huang won first place in the Cities and Nature category for his shot of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge surrounded by fog, while Austrian Colin Ronald shot his winning Landscape picture high on the Slovenian Alps.
The first place in the People category went to Le Van Vinh, who took a photo of a fisherman surrounded by his net in the Phu Yen province of Vietnam. Australian Alex Kydd brought home first place in the Water category with a stunning shot of a whale shark swimming in the depths of Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia. Finally, Mexican Fernando O’Farrill won first place in the Wildlife category for his overhead shot of a polar bear swimming in the waters around the Svalbard Islands.
If you’d like to see a complete gallery of the winning images, you can do so on the Nature Conservancy’s official website here.