The 2021 Buglife Bug Photography Awards winners have been announced.
Buglife Bug Photography Awards awards the best photographs of any species of invertebrate taken anywhere in the world.
Buglife Bug Photography Awards Winners
The Buglife Bug Photographer of the Year 2021 is Steve James from Northampton, UK. He wins a host of prizes including £2,500 cash.
Steve is the grand prize winner of this second year of the awards, in recognition of the diverse and technically excellent studies that he produces of the insect life that he finds around his Northampton, UK home. He’s had a long-lasting love of photography, inspired by his father’s interest. He’s fascinated by the worlds “as alien as science fiction” that one uncovers in the most common of places, and he hopes that by portraying insects at large scale, humans will have more sympathy for them. He recommends anyone with an interest to plant up an area of their garden with native flowers, and he was amazed during lockdown to see how quickly the grass verges that were left to grow became full of insect life. He likens the experience of building a focus-stacked image on a screen, to that you’d get watching a print come to life in darkroom developing fluids.
Winning images here
See Steve’s work on Photocrowd
The Buglife Young Bug Photographer of the Year is 14-year old Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas from Berlin, Germany.
Alexis is 14 years old, is half Greek and half Canadian, and lives in Berlin, Germany. He got his first camera in 2017 and has been taking photos ever since. He says “I like that I can do macro photography anywhere and I don’t have to go far away or to a special location to find interesting subjects. I got more seriously into macro photography in the initial lockdown in 2020 and spent a lot of time near my house looking for bugs.” He wins with this excellent shot of a Masked bee. His top tip is to use a flash and diffuser, to achieve nice even lighting.
Winning images here
See Alexis’ work on Instagram
