Nature Photography How To

Last month we shared several of our favorite entries in the 2016 National Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year competition, and now that the spectacular winners have been chosen, we thought we’d feature a few of the First and Second Place Winners.

Photographers have long been challenged when attempting to capture the splendor of big mountain ranges, both in terms of equipment and geography. In his quest to document Italy’s Dolomites, Kurt Moser decided to go really big, by converting a 45-year-old Russian military truck into a giant camera.

As photographer Jessica Dyer writes about this incredible slow motion video of a hummingbird: “Wait for it…and turn on the sound.”

Yousef Al Habshi is an award-winning photographer based in Abu Dabi. He specializes in macro photography, and the spectacular images of insects you see here are part of his Little Monsters project.

While Shutterbug reader Robert Dunham dreams of shooting the vast landscapes in Montana, he has found “great wonder and satisfaction in shooting macro” at his North Carolina home. He combines his two favorite pastimes, gardening and photography, by “taking a bunch of gear to the garden and splitting time between the spade and the camera.”

Photographing fireflies is a “thing” in Japan, where every summer photographers venture out in the early evening to capture these winged insects painting the landscape fantastic. These “lightnin’ bugs” also do their illuminating dance in the Southern United States, so you may want to try photographing their bioluminescence yourself.

Shutterbug reader Bill Tiepelman captured this profile of a beautiful red-bellied woodpecker in his backyard in Wentzville, Missouri. An avid bird watcher, Tiepelman has on old swing set in his backyard that he repurposed into a bird sanctuary in an effort to “attract as many species as possible.”