GDT Nature Photographer of the Year 2025
Our member competition is open to all GDT members!
Submission period: 15.12.2024 - 01.02.2025
We look forward to receiving your entries and are excited to experience the diversity of nature photography through your eyes. Show us your world, share your stories and let's enjoy the beauty of nature together!
Valuable prizes await the overall winners as well as the first and second place winners in each category. The winning pictures will be exhibited for the first time at our membership meeting and then presented at the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation in Bonn. The exhibition will open there with a media-effective vernissage and then move on to the International Nature Photography Festival in Lünen, where a selection of the images will be on display.
All the images will also be published in an extensive photo series in the GDT Forum Naturfotografie magazine and on our website at www.gdtfoto.de. This competition also attracts a great deal of international interest from the public media.
Online participation
Competition rules
You can find the competition rules here.The closing date for entries was February 1, 2025 - 24:00.
Categories
Our competition is divided into seven categories:
- K1 - Birds
- K2 - Mammals
- K3 - Other animals
- K4 - Plants and fungi
- K5 - Landscapes
- K6 - Nature studio
- K7 - Special category: Both eerie and beautiful - Germany‘s Peatlands and Bogs
Judging Panel
Our qualified jury of nature photographers will carefully review the entries and select the top ten works in each category during the main judging.The GDT members will then vote from the jury selection in two rounds: the first round of voting (category rankings) will be online and open to all. For organizational and technical reasons, the second voting round (selection of the overall winner from all category winners) can unfortunately only take place live during the members' meeting.
Peter Lindel
Peter Lindel has been taking photos of anything he can get his hands on since the age of 14. However, his enthusiasm for animals began in childhood: two animals from the children's cosmos every evening, read aloud by his father - just as analogue as the photography back then. He has been a serious nature photographer for around 20 years and his focus is clearly on mammals. His photographic work - or rather pleasure - can best be divided into ‘Dortmund’ and ‘elsewhere’. He would describe himself as a classic animal photographer, if this category still applies today. If the result and the experience are equally satisfying, then it was a nature photography day for Peter that he remembers fondly. The different approaches and image styles of the many nature photographers are what make it interesting for him to look at their pictures and certainly not the fact that they may have the same focus as he does.
Many of his pictures have won awards in prestigious photography competitions, including Wildlife Photographer of the Year. In 2020, he was named GDT Nature Photographer of the Year.
www.naturfolger.de
Melanie Arndt
www.MelanieArndt.de
Thomas Scheffel
Even as a child, Thomas Scheffel was magically drawn to nature. His native Rheinhessen was a small world waiting to be discovered. From his early youth, he discovered photography as a medium for preserving his experiences. Now he has been on this path for over 30 years and the world has become bigger and bigger. After travelling extensively, his photographic focus is still on his immediate surroundings. The fascination of seeing familiar things in a new way and turning them into pictures is what drives him time and again. Nature photography has become the guiding principle of his life, albeit not professionally. His pictures are intended to inspire the viewer with a personal perspective and convey connections. For Thomas, travelling in nature is a way of better understanding many things. Although the image remains the great driving force for him, it is no longer mandatory. The realisation that ‘bigger, faster, further’ is not his goal is the essence of his long journey in nature photography. Creative perspectives, special moments and the simple, clear beauty of nature guide his design.
www.scheffel-naturfoto.de
Sponsor
We would like to thank AC-Foto for their generous sponsorship.
