“Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing”
Bear Gills
I’ve now won enough competitions to be able to call myself an ‘international award-winning photographer’, but it’s a bit of a fool’s errand.
The only one anyone ever seems to have heard of is the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition run by the Natural History Museum, but it receives 50,000 entries a year from over 100 countries and only displays the top 100 images in its annual exhibition.
I’ve never managed to make it that far, and I get a bit frustrated with the judges’ apparent obsession with novelty and pictures with a ‘message’ - the first time I visited the exhibition, I only liked 12 out of the 150 images!
I’ll keep entering every year, but it’s a triumph of hope over experience…
It’s also important to remember that there are very few cash prizes on offer in photography competitions, and it’s not cheap to enter them these days - I stopped when I eventually realised that I was spending two or three hundred pounds a month just on entry fees!
Yes, it was nice to win a few prizes, especially the £250 Wex voucher I won in the Sunday Times/Audley Travel Big Shot with this picture of a bear catching salmon (above), but I only enter the free competitions now.
There used to be quite a few run by the national newspapers and other publications, but a lot of those have vanished recently:
However, I still enter the few that remain, and I’ve set up a repeat event in my calendar to remind me on the 15th of every month:
Society of International Nature & Wildlife Photographers
I’ve given up my membership now, but non-members can still enter any of the free competitions they advertise on their website. The prize is usually just free membership of the Society for six or 12 months, but they have a good PR team, and I was once featured in several tabloids and interviewed on London Live after winning one of the SINWP awards.Professional Photographer of the Year
This is a recently founded competition that you can enter for free with one image each month. The prize is a Panasonic Lumix S1R with a 24-105mm f/4 lens worth £3,000. The only annoying snag is that you can’t copy and paste text either from or to the entry form due to supposed copyright reasons, so you have to type in all your image’s metadata. What a pain…!The Click Photo Contest
There seem to be a ton of digital photography magazines out there these days, and most of them have competitions. This one has a monthly theme, and the prize is a feature in the magazine.ePHOTOzine
This is another digital photography magazine, and it runs various daily and weekly challenges as well as giving awards to the judges’ favourite images uploaded by users. It’s free to join, and it’s nice to get a bit of positive feedback from the other members. I’ve won a couple of memory cards in the March 2020 and March 2021 Daily Competitions, and I’ve now won one Photo of the Week, five Editor’s Choice, 17 Highly Commended, 13 Guest Editor, 73 Readers' Choice and 167 User Awards!Outdoor Photography
This is another magazine, but it’s quite a useful way to get images and articles published. There are various competitions, and winning submissions are published in the magazine and receive cash prizes of up to £150.Arthola
Arthola is a recent start-up that offers screensavers to clients using the work of any photographers who contribute their work. I’ve never made any money out of that side of the business, but they do run a monthly competition with a $50 cash prize, and I won it a few years back.Sunday Times Big Shot
I still enter the Big Shot competition, but what I do these days is tag all my Instagram Shots of the Week with @sundaytimestravel and #STBigShot.Instagram
There are a lot of accounts on Instagram that will feature an image or even allow a ‘takeover’ for a day. There’s never any prize money, but it’s free to enter, and all you have to do is add hashtags and/or account names to your images. Here’s a list of the ones I’m using at the moment: #STBigShot @timestravel #NaturesApparel #wildlife_perfection #kings_animals_love #earthescope #onlyafrica #wildlife_perfection #live_love_wildlife #wild_planet #photography_our_uk #featured_wildlife #photography_our_world #animalife_world #wildography #BBCWildlifePOTD #ThePIPAS2020 #wildlife #wild @african_wildlife_photography #pretty_shotz @artmajeur @african_wildlife_photography #bonvac_fauna #african_portraits @Wildlife_clickersofficial #Wildlife_clickers #epic_wildlife #pics2share_wildlife #capturethewild
If money is no object, then feel free to enter the more prestigious contests that require an entry fee.
Here’s a list of the ones with a wildlife category that I’ve entered in the past.
To sum it all up, photography competitions are a great way to get a bit of an ego boost, and the way I started was to find the competitions that had the fewest entries so that I had the best chance of winning!
However, it’s very hard to win any of the handful of premium contests such as the Wildlife Photographer of the Year.
Yes, the prizes in those contests appear to be very generous, and winning would provide you with a lot of useful publicity, but you also have to consider your chances of winning.
Entering the Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest is a bit like buying a lottery ticket along with 50,000 other people, all with an equally slim chance of success!
If you’re still determined to dip your toe in the water, I recommend signing up with a site such as Photo Contest Insider, which will send you periodic email alerts and allow you to filter all the available contests by criteria such as whether you have to pay to enter and what prizes are on offer.
If you win a few plaudits along the way, then I guess it’s all worthwhile.
Good luck!
If you’d like to order a framed print of one of my wildlife photographs, please visit the Prints page.
If you’d like to book a lesson or order an online photography course, please visit my Lessons and Courses pages.