Wildlife Photography Exhibition

This weekend I went to the Natural History Museum with Bjorn and Veronika to see the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition.

Here is one of the pictures that didn’t win:

This is the 3/4 scale Tyranosaurus Rex (or full size, teenage T-Rex, if you want to look at it that way) that is on display in the museum. It is animated and snaps its jaws at visitors to its enclosure. I found it very convincing, though clearly it wasn’t going to come to life and run after me.

The wildlife in the photography exhibition was a little more realistic. I wasn’t so sure of the judges choice of overall winner. It is a great picture, but there were plenty of others that struck me as more impressive. Certainly other photographers had gone to much greater lengths to get their pictures. What would you rather snap - Polar bears in the wild, or starlings in a city park?

I’m not entirely sure I get photography as an art, anyway. It never strikes me as being as creative as other forms of artistic expression. You take what’s there, don’t you? However, the stories accompanying the pictures in the gallery really helped to bring the photographs to life. They meant a lot more to me because of that.