Youth category

A brown rat is sitting in the floor of my cellar, it didn't move so so I walk silently away to my apartment, grab my camera gear and go back to the cellar. Now the rat is gone but I set up my camera gear and connect the camera with my phone so I can trigger the camera remotely and hide behind a corner; and after a while the rat appears again!

Leaf-cutter ants (Atta sp.) active at night in the Tambopata Reserve, in the Peruvian Amazon, near Puerto de Maldonado. I was very struck by the nocturnal activity of this species. Due to the protected status of the reserve and its isolated location, it is one of the most biodiverse places in the world. I used a Godox V1 flash with a large homemade diffuser to prevent glare.

On a stormy evening after a day-long rain, I walked to the island’s eastern tip at low tide. As the sun broke through, I spotted a harbour seal (Phoca vitulina) resting on a sandbank—its daily routine after a successful high-tide hunt. In the golden light, I quietly approached and watched it in peaceful stillness.

One day I was walking along the path in a nearby park and I saw a hollowed out tree stump, measuring around half a metre in diameter, surrounded by young trees. I put my camera inside the stump, hoping to take pictures of birds flying overhead (Fringillidae). I had to return to the place I found over and over again. To capture the moment depicted, I've spent tons of hours watching the birds.

This winter vacation, my dad took me to the Qinghai Tibet Plateau to shoot wild animals. He was my work partner and mentor. He taught me how to find the Blue Sheep or bharal (Pseudois nayaur). Blue Sheep are very cautious and do not easily expose their position. They observe everything around them very carefully.

The neuroptera are beautiful insects that make their appearance in spring, a kind of cross between a dragonfly and a butterfly. They are very restless hunters and difficult to photograph, only at dawn or dusk can they be approached, just when the air temperature decreases, which prevents them from flying and is when they fold their wings. This is Libelloides baeticus, an endemism of the Iberian Peninsula.