The Bird Photographer of the Year competition is an annual celebration of avian imagery that captures some of the most breathtaking photographs of birds from around the globe.
The competition is open to photographers of all ages, from anywhere in the world, and features some of the world’s best bird photography. Each year, the organisers publish a collection of the winning and commended entries in a beautiful hardback book. Published by Princeton University Press, Bird Photographer of the Year Collection 9 showcases the photographs that made the cut in 2024.
This is a large, hardback book that offers plenty of space on the page to allow the photos to really shine. And it is all about the photography, despite an engaging foreward by renowned wildlife cameraman and TV luminary Simon King, contributions from the Birds on the Brink board of trustees, and the occasional comment from the judging panel, nobody is picking this book up for its prose. That said, the text that accompanies each photograph: the photographer’s story about how they captured the image, and the EXIF data that shows the camera details and settings used to achieve it, make for interesting reading.
This is a premium publication in every sense of the word, with the photographs exquisitely reproduced throughout. Leafing through the book, you quickly become immersed in the wonder of the images, to the point where it’s easy to lose track of time. There appears to be no specific order to the book’s presentation of individual images. It isn’t arranged by category, or in order of achievement in the competition, or anything else. Other than a general attempt by the editors to group aesthetically complimentary photographs together on each double-page spread, the categories and accolades appear to be mixed more or less randomly throughout the book. It works well.
This more-or-less random arrangement provides plenty of variety as you flick from page to page. The one downside is that the lack of order doesn’t make finding the winners in each category that straightforward while flipping through the pages. Luckily, there’s a handy table of contents at the start of the book that makes it easy to look up winning photographs and go straight to the relevant page. Of course, the aesthetics of photographs are very much subjective — so for me, and quite possibly for you — many of the commended and highly commended entries could resonate more than the award winners.
After the images from the individual competition, the book showcases the Portfolio Award Winner, Conservation and Documentary Award Winner and winning entries for the Young Bird Photographer of the Year in 11 and under, 12-14 and 15-17-year-old categories.
All in all this is a wonderful book for anyone interested in birds, photography or just celebrating the visual splendour of our avian biodiversity at its very best.
Bird Photographer of the Year Collection 9 (ISBN 978-0-691-26359-5), edited by Will Nichols and Paul Sterry and published by Princeton University Press, is available now via the Bird Photographer of the Year website and at all good bookshops online or in-store.
You can also buy Bird Photographer of the Year Collection 9 on Amazon.
All profits from the BPOTY competition, and presumably from the sale of the book too, go towards bird conservation projects via the Birds on the Brink charity set up by the organisers.
You can browse all the winning entries form Bird Photographer of the Year 2024 on the Bird Photographer of the Year website here, where you’ll also find details of how to enter for the 2025 competition, which is now open.