2011 flew by and was an eventful year for Burrard-Lucas Photography. For me there were some truly memorable and humbling experiences such as coming face to face with a wild giant panda in China and being confronted by the legendary Komodo dragon in Indonesia. In this post I have provided a summary of some year’s most significant developments and a brief teaser for things to come in 2012.

Community

2011 saw the emergence of a new social network, Google+. I tested out the platform early on and quickly discovered it was great for sharing photos! The network has become very popular and it is now an essential venue for me. If you would like to receive the latest Burrard-Lucas news and images then please “Circle” me on Google+.

The year also saw our community on Facebook go from strength to strength. If you would like to view our latest work on Facebook, please “Like” our page.

Twitter continues to be my favorite venue for networking and sharing ideas… follow @willbl to connect with me and join the conversation!

Finally, our photo contest series continues to thrive, with the standard of photography better than ever. Our Pet, Landscape and Wildlife contest attracted some stunning entries. Our Travel photo contest is still open, so enter now for a chance to win our grand prize for 2011, a Canon EOS 60D! We will be running another contest series next year so subscribe to our newsletter if you would like to find out when each contest opens for entries.

Competitions

We were honored to be recognized in three major competitions in 2011. Perhaps the achievement we were most proud of was receiving our first award for video; our short film “Migration” won the Moving Image Award in the Sony World Photography Awards. The awards ceremony was a red carpet event at the Odeon, Leicester Square in London. It was a fantastic experience and we are looking forward to further experimenting with video in the future.

We also had three highly commended images in the Nature’s Best Winland Smith Rice International Awards; Orangutan Fountain, Baby Gorillas and Penguins Showering. Our penguin and orangutan images were selected to be part of the annual awards exhibition in the Smithsonian Museum, Washington DC.

Finally, we received a highly commended mention in the GDT European Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest with our photograph of this big-eyed snake from Madagascar.

Photo Tours

During the year we announced a partnership with Steppes Discovery, a travel company based in the UK. I will be leading two international photo tours in 2012; one to the Pantanal in Brazil and one to Madagascar. I have worked with Steppes to put together two fantastic itineraries that will be a lot of fun whilst also providing some unbeatable photographic opportunities! For more information about these tours, read this post: New Pantanal & Madagascar Photo Tours for 2012

Next year I will also be announcing a Masai Mara photo tour that will take place in August 2012. Keep an eye out for a formal announcement in the near future.

Coming in 2012…

We have some very exciting releases planned for 2012! Firstly, I have just returned from 5 weeks of photographing wolves in the highlands of Ethiopia. I have already posted a few pictures on Google+, Facebook and Flickr but there is still much more to come!

Secondly, some news I know a lot of you have been waiting for… BeetleCam will soon be back! We recently completed a top-secret mission to Kenya for the next installment of the Adventures of BeetleCam. The results were better than we could ever have hoped for. Expect to find out more some time in February!

Finally, we have big plans for the Burrard-Lucas Photography community in 2012. We are planning to start providing more educational resources and we will be launching a revamped photo contest series. Subscribe to our newsletter if you would like to be kept informed.

That’s about it for now! Thanks for all your support this year. Enjoy the holiday season and have a great new year!

P.S. Still haven’t got your 2012 calendars? Our wildlife photo calendar is available from our online store.

What is 500px?

500px is a photo sharing service that has really exploded in popularity recently. Part of the reason for this is the freakishly high standard of photographs that can be found in the galleries! This is a side-effect of 500px being a breath of fresh air that has lured many of the web’s best photographers away from more established alternatives.

The site is free to join and allows you to upload up to 20 photos per week. It encourages you to share only your best shots. The overall site design is attractive and shows off the pictures beautifully (you can see ours here: Will & Matt Burrard-Lucas). There is a good community of people already on 500px and I have been impressed with the number of views and comments my photos have been receiving.

The site has a decent ranking system that gives each photograph a score between 0 and 100. It is rather addictive because you can watch your score climb with every “like”! If a picture’s score is high enough, it will get promoted to the Popular page, resulting in a ton of exposure and comments.

However, for me the best thing about 500px is the responsive team of people who are working tirelessly to improve the site (I have noticed a few incremental improvements even in the short time that I have been using it). If you contact them for any reason you will usually get a rapid response.

Awesome Accounts

Upgrading to an Awesome account will cost you $50 and gives you a couple of handy benefits:

1. You can upload an unlimited number of photos without the weekly limit.
2. You receive a premium portfolio… this is basically a standalone website that displays the photos you have uploaded to 500px. There are several very attractive portfolio designs to choose from. What’s cool is you can set a custom domain name, making this a great way to build your own website if you don’t already have one. You can see our portfolio here: http://wildlife.500px.com/

Giveaway: Win One of 10 Awesome Accounts!

The kind people over at 500px have generously donated $500 worth of Awesome accounts for us to give away to you, our blog subscribers and facebook fans!

All you have to do to become eligible for this draw is complete two simple steps:

1. Sign up for a free 500px account here: http://500px.com/signup
2. Login and start following our account: Will & Matt Burrard-Lucas

The deadline is 11:59pm (GMT) on Saturday (25th June). After the deadline we will go through our list of followers and select 10 accounts at random to receive a free 1-year Awesome account worth $50!

Once you’ve got your new 500px account and uploaded a few photos, feel free to share a link to it in the comments below. We look forward to seeing your shots!

Update: The giveaway is now over! Congratulations to the following users who have received 1 year of awesomeness: Beyondthelimitsphotography, mkshft, Bobbyjojo, nigelivy, KevinXolio, richmedia, shells_moments, RupeshJadhav, ColinCampbell, azmi5245. A big thank you to everyone who took part! If you were not a winner but still want an Awesome account, you can get 20% off using the promo code “friends”!

We will be running more giveaways in the future so make sure you sign up to our newsletter so that we can keep you informed, you can subscribe by email or via RSS

Limited Edition Prints

We’ve made some of our favourite photographs available as stunning framed limited edition prints. Our standard prints include a black frame, a 2-inch white mount, non-reflective glass and a certificate of authenticity attached to the back. Checkout the print store for more details.

Wildlife 2011 Calendar

We have also produced a new A3 wall-hanging Wildlife Calendar featuring some of our favourite images from around the world. The calendars fold to A4-size making them easy to send as Christmas gifts. They cost just £6.95 plus shipping and can be posted worldwide. Checkout the calendar store for more details.

Giveaways!

To celebrate the launch of our new store, we have two fun giveaways for you to take part in!

Calendar giveaway: We will be giving a free calendar to five lucky readers! All you have to do to enter is look at our online print store and leave a comment on this post telling us which print is your favourite and why. In two weeks, we will select five commenters at random to receive a free calendar. If you have already purchased a calendar, you will receive a full refund.

Limited edition print giveaway: We will be giving away a free limited edition print worth over £100 to one lucky reader! This print will be framed if you live in the UK or unframed if you live outside the UK. Anyone who purchases one of our Wildlife 2011 calendars within the next two weeks will be eligible for this giveaway. In two weeks time, we will select one calendar buyer at random to receive the prize. Each calendar you buy will be an additional entry into the draw, so if you buy three calendars you will be three times more likely to win. If you have recently purchased a print and you win this prize, you can opt for a full refund of your original purchase.

Update: These giveaways are now over.

We will be talking about our recent trip to the Falkland Islands and illustrating the presentation with lots and lots of photographs! We will reveal how we took some of our favourite pictures and tell you a bit about the animals themselves. There will be some time at the end for us to answer any questions you might have. The talk is free once you have paid admission to the Wetland Centre (admission prices can be found here). For an idea of what we will be talking about, take a look at the following posts: Falkland Islands Photography, Penguins, Penguins, Penguins! & Nesting Shags – Varying the Perspective.

After the talk we will also be leading a free photo walk around the Centre so make sure you bring along your cameras! During the walk we will be on hand to give advice and help you improve your photographs.

The London Wetland Centre is a wonderful venue within a stone’s throw of Central London (directions can be found here). We have visited the Centre on a couple of occasions and were able to photograph many beautiful wild birds and insects. You can see some of our images taken at the Centre here: London Wetland Centre.

Our talk and walk is one of a series of events being held at the Wetland Centre in celebration of their 10th Anniversary. To find out more about our talk and other events, please click here. Note that the talk will take place in the main theatre and is limited to a maximum of 80 people on a first-come, first-served basis.

P.S. We have set up a Facebook Event for this talk. On the event page you can find additional details, indicate whether you plan to attend and send an invite to friends who you think might be interested.

On the surface the website hasn’t changed much but under the hood it has been completely rebuilt and there are a number of additional new features. We have also updated the galleries with our most recent work and added many new images which have never before been displayed online. We are still working hard to add new photos and caption / tag all of the existing images so please bear with us. In the meantime, here are some of the new features to look out for…

New ways to browse photos

• Portfolio – A selection of our favourite images from around the world.
• Galleries – Brand new wildlife and travel photo galleries.
• Photo explorer – Browse photographs based on their keyword tags.

Lightboxes – Easily and quickly create your own collection of Burrard-Lucas images. You can then save your lightbox for later viewing or email it to friends.

Share links – Easily share photographs with your friends via email or through your favourite social network.

Lights on/off mode – Turn the lights off to view pictures on a nice black background!

Slideshows – Lookout for the slideshow link… click on it, sit back and enjoy the show!

Please let us know what you think of the new site. All feedback and suggestions will be very much appreciated!

To coincide with the exhibition we have launched a brand new website: WildExhibition.com. On the site you can find out more about the exhibition and see all of the featured photographs. You can also check out our new series of limited edition prints, our 2010 calendar and greeting cards featuring photos from the exhibition.

We visited Heathrow Airport last night to view the exhibition for the first time… it was wonderful to see our images printed large and it was nice to observe other people looking at our work. You can view our exclusive behind the scenes pictures from the exhibition on our facebook fan page.

Finally, if you get the opportunity to see the exhibition then please let us know what you think!

For more information please visit WildExhibition.com.

Here are some of the topics that were covered in the interview:

• How I got started in photography
• What gear I use
• How Matthew and I work to together as a team
• My wildlife photography tips
• Wildlife photography destinations
• Some of the ways I market my work
• And much more!

I also included a few photographs in the interview which I have not previously displayed online.

Read the full interview here.

If the interview prompts any further questions then feel free to leave a comment on the interview page or on this blog post.