Happy holidays everyone! It is hard to believe another year is almost over!
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.
