Burrard-Lucas Blog - Wildlife Photography

Update! This contest is now closed, click here to see the winning photos from this contest.

Enter our current photo contest: Landscape Photo Competition

First of all, thank you to everyone who entered our Wildlife Photography Contest, once again we have been very impressed by the quality of the entries we have received. The winning photographs will be announced soon.

The final competition in our 2010 photo contest series is now open for entries. The theme is “Travel”. In this contest we are looking for your most interesting and striking travel photographs. You are not limited to any subject matter in particular… travel photography can portray many things such as an area’s people, cultures, customs, history or landscape. The deadline for this contest is 5th January 2011.

Prizes

We have some fantastic prizes on offer including the chance to win a Canon EOS 7D Digital SLR camera (more info).

Lensbaby and Smugmug have generously donated the following additional prizes:

• Winner: Lensbaby Composer and a SmugMug Pro account.
• Runners up x 2: SmugMug standard accounts.

Click here for more information about the 2010 prizes.

To receive notification when the winners are announced, please subscribe to our free newsletter. You can either subscribe by email or by RSS feed.

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Madagascar is home to a diverse array of gecko species. Geckos are unique among lizards as they have the ability to stick to almost any surface! This is because gecko feet have special adaptations which are believed to generate attractive van der Waals forces between their toes and the surface they are on. Apparently, these forces are so strong that a gecko can support about eight times its weight hanging from just one toe on smooth glass! This is just one amazing gecko fact, read on to find out more about some of the incredible geckos that we photographed in Madagascar…

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Ahead of Christmas we have launched a brand new online gift store! We also have two fun giveaways for you to take part in… read on for details!

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Lemurs are primitive primates found only in Madagascar. The ancestor of all lemurs was probably carried to Madagascar on a raft of vegetation from mainland Africa around 62 to 65 million years ago. Since that time, lemurs have evolved into many different forms in order to take advantage of different habitats and ecological niches. Today there are nearly 100 species of lemur and, during our time in Madagascar, we photographed a variety of different species.

Lemurs living today can be split into five distinct families:

• Brown Lemurs & Allies – diurnal, stereotypical lemurs such as the ring-tailed lemurs.
• Sifakas, Indri & Wolly Lemurs – diurnal, the largest species of lemur belong to this family.
• Sportive Lemurs – nocturnal, during the day they can be found sleeping in tree hollows.
• Mouse Lemurs & Allies – nocturnal, this family includes the world’s smallest primates.
• Aye-ayes – nocturnal and very elusive.

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Back in August we spent four weeks travelling around Madagascar. Our aim was to photograph as much of the Island’s unique wildlife as possible. We had an incredible time and were overwhelmed by the diversity of animal species that we came across.

The Island of Madagascar split away from mainland Africa around 160 million years ago. This isolation created a laboratory in which animals could evolve into weird and wonderful forms in order to fill different ecological niches. Madagascar is now home to 5% of the world’s plant and animal species, of which more than 80% are endemic (i.e. they are found nowhere else on Earth).

Madagascar’s fantastic biodiversity is in part due to its highly varied habitats. These range from cool highland rainforests in East to arid deciduous and spiny forests in the West. We started our trip in the lush tropical rainforest of Amber Mountain National Park in the North of Madagascar.

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It never ceases to amaze me how often nature reveals something unexpected; no matter how much time I spend photographing wildlife, scarcely a day goes by in which I do not witness some surprising aspect of an animal’s behaviour or an unusual individual.

We have just returned from a trip to the Masai Mara in Kenya where we were photographing the annual wildebeest migration. After a rather uneventful morning, we stopped on the banks of the Mara River for a picnic breakfast. It was then that we came across a truly exceptional individual… just as we started to tuck into our breakfast, we looked up and gawked, open-mouthed, as a pink hippopotamus emerged from the river! Hippos are usually dark brown in colour, so this individual was very conspicuous! We dropped our breakfast and reached for our cameras.

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Yes that’s right… earlier this year I, William Burrard-Lucas, got married to the love of my life, Natalie!

Nat and I aren’t really ones for lying around on beaches, so we decided to go on safari for our honeymoon (yippee)! The day after our wedding we were on a plane to Zambia for two weeks of wildlife and relaxation. Obviously BeetleCam was not invited on this trip (although I did manage to sneak two camera bodies, 4 lenses, a couple of speedlite flashes and a tripod into our luggage)!

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