For  the second year, join us on a year-long weekly photography challenge, designed especially for nature and wildlife photographers. Storytelling, wildlife advocacy, and creative/artistic photography is where my heart is, and I hope to encourage more photographers to not just stop at taking gorgeous wildlife photos but to take them further. These weekly challenges encourage you to think about how your images can be composed and used to advocate for our precious wildlife (story), to hook the viewer in with compelling, creative images (creative), and to increase your technical skills and development (technical).
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I have created each challenge so that most people can participate, regardless of skill level or where you live in the world (though you will notice a New Zealand bias!). Most challenges can be achieved with just a camera phone. Be warned - you will (hopefully!) be pushed outside your comfort zone, and you will likely need to do some Googling to learn more about new techniques, but that's also the point :)

This is your challenge - do as much or as little as you want and in your own timeframe - it's up to you to decide what works best for you. I do encourage you to take new photos for the challenges, rather than digging through your archives. You can take photos in advance and "bank" them and you can do them out of order. All I ask is that you try to take the photos intentionally with the challenges in mind, rather than retrofitting an image to fit the theme.

With an emphasis on storytelling and advocacy, I encourage you to post your images to social media (especially Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Flickr) and to your blog if you have one. Use hashtags to enable us to find and share your images:
  • Challenge hashtags: #artofbirding #artofbirding2019 #aob2019week1 through to #aob2019week52.
  • Find the hashtags used by the conservation projects you are photographing, e.g., #sharemezealandia, #orokonui, so they can pick up and share your photos too.
  • Use the hashtags commonly used for your critter: e.g., #kaka, #takahe, along with #conservation, #wildlife, and other more general terms.
Join our public Facebook group and post your photos, discuss the challenges, and get and give help and advice.

Download an iCal (*.ics) calendar to load into your calendar app or join the public Google calendar [to be released in Dec 2018].

Download a printable PDF of the challenges [to be released in Dec 2018].

Can't wait for 2019? Join our 2018 challenge and just jump on in with the current week.

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The weekly challenges...

to be released in Dec 2018