Produced to accompany the Nature's Best Photography "Best of the Best" Exhibition, this video brings you nature photography from the past 20 years including grand prize winners, youth winners, and the Windland Smith Rice International Awards winners for 2014 and 2015. It is shown on a Panasonic 65" LED LCD flat panel display at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. Every year these annual photo exhibitions are viewed by millions of people in one of the world's most highly-visited and respected museums, open daily and free to the public.
The complete collection of winners and highly honored images is featured in the Fall 2015 special 20th Anniversary edition of Nature's Best Photography magazine in the museum shops and on the NBP website at naturesbestphotography.com/store.
Go to naturesbestphotography.com to enter your own pictures in the current competitions and learn more.
There was an idea to go beyond the pages of the magazine
to inspire a greater understanding and stewardship of the natural world
through photographic documentation, artistic appreciation,
and interactive conservation education programs.
My passion for photography really grew to extreme levels when I moved to Africa
and I knew right away I wanted it to be my life full time.
It was a fantastic afternoon.
We were with a pride of lions called the Rakero pride
and they had lots of cubs.
There were about ten little fluffy lion cubs
and as lion cubs are they wanted to play so they were bouncing around
and then there was just one particular moment
where this cub was coming closer and closer to its mother and I could see
so I focused on this mother and the cub was kind of nestling against the legs
and eventually it popped through the front two legs
and the mom just kind of clamped it so she put her legs together
and this cub was kind of wiggling around looking at this
and so I took a sequence of about ten pictures
and I was just killing myself with laughter.
It was so funny. It was so cute.
The day I got the picture the weather was beautiful
and I knew that which is also a reason that I chose to go up that day.
It just looked like there was going to be a good chance for weather
so if I could find the sheep I felt like I had a really nice opportunity.
That's why I take photos to see that final product
and to see it displayed on such a grand scale at such high quality it's just fantastic.
During the winter me and my dad like to drive along the country roads looking for screech owls.
At past winter we had found two different screech owls in two different cavities.
But there was this one tree which was a sycamore tree
where I was convinced that there would be a screech owl in it.
We were driving along one day and I told my dad to pull over
because there in that same tree was a beautiful rufous screech owl.
There's this instinct that we have that seeing an image that's powerful
can inspire people to take action.
