The "22nd Annual Nature’s Best Photography Windland Smith Rice International Awards" Exhibit (Washington D.C., U.S.A.)

 

The 22nd Annual Nature’s Best Photography Windland Smith Rice International Awards Exhibition

The renowned 22nd Annual Nature’s Best Photography Windland Smith Rice International Awards Exhibition, held from October 24, 2017 – September 3, 2018 at the National Museum of Natural History, displays 60 extraordinary and stunning images that capture the beauty and diversity of the natural world. It presents fine art prints accompanied by an HD video, were displayed as large format prints ranging in size from 2′ x 3′ to nearly 4′ x 6′ in the museum. 

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The exhibition prints were created on a 44-inch Epson (global sponsor for the sixth consecutive year) wide-format printer. Videos feature nature photographers at work, hearing their experiences and seeing how they got their shots.

 

Polar Bear & Cubs (Wapuska National Park, Manitoba, Canada)

These images showcase the work of outdoor photographers in 59 countries (Brazil, India, Mexico, China, England, Spain, South Africa, Virginia, U.S.A., etc.), selected from more than 26,000 submitted entries submitted to the 2017 Nature’s Best Photography Windland Smith Rice Awards (named after nature photographer and conservationist,  Sandra Windland "Wendy" Smith Rice, who died in 2005). 

United by their creativity and technical skill with a camera, these artists, of all ages and experience, share visions of nature to inspire its preservation.

 

Photos from Africa

The display features the 2017 Windland Awards category Winners and a selection of the Highly Honored images from the NBP Awards competitions, including winners from Nature's Best Photography Asia and the Audubon Photography Awards. 

African Lionesses, taken by Sri Lankan photographer Lakshitha Karunarathna on Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve,  was the recipient of the grand prize. It featured a pride of lionesses lie huddled in the soft sun of morning.

 

Photos from Asia

Women and men, as well as older and younger artists, were all well-represented. The 15 year old, New Jersey-born Ashleigh Scully, responsible for a candid shot of two ursine siblings wrestling in a wide meadow, won the Youth Photographer of the Year title. 

The collection of crisp, kaleidoscopically colored photos, some of them life-size, were all of them captured in eye-popping high resolution. 

Images include the frantic dash of a western grebe courtship ritual; a brace of giraffes locked in neck-to-neck combat; a posse of penguins on the march beneath a molten sky; and an arc of lightning across the smoke of an erupting volcano. 

 

Photos from the youth

22nd Annual Nature's Best Photography Windland Smith Rice International Awards: 2/F National Museum of Natural History, 10th St. and Constitution Ave., NW, Washington, DC.