Sonoma Valley teen wins pair of prestigious wildlife images awards

Leo Dale doesn’t imply to sound ungrateful, recalling the numerous hikes on which he accompanied his dad and mom, beginning when he was a small boy.

But typically, when his mom and father would cease to admire a wildflower or vista, “I would get bored, and want to do something,” recalled Dale, 18, who graduated from Sonoma Academy final spring and is now a freshman at Colby College in Maine.

He began bringing alongside a digital camera. What started as a pastime and pastime for the Sonoma Valley resident has now developed right into a consuming ardour.

“When you’re in an amazing place, or seeing an amazing animal, you feel so many different kinds of wonder and awe,” stated Dale, who seeks “to capture that wonder in a picture.”

He’s extraordinarily good at it. That’s the consensus of judges in a pair of prestigious images competitions.

In November, the worldwide images group Nature Talks, primarily based within the Netherlands, awarded Dale first place within the youth division of its 2025 Nature Photographer of the Year contest, for his gorgeous picture of a trotting bobcat with prey in its jaws.

Jury member Marlon del Aguila Guerrero, an acclaimed Peruvian wildlife photographer, stated that judges had been wowed by the “execution” and “technical control” Dale had summoned “to create a stunning panning image of this bobcat, and above all, with the perfect timing of the connection of gazes, which made us feel invited to share its moment of successful hunting. A rarely seen mastery, surprising to come from such a young talent.”

On Dec. 10, the National Wildlife Federation named Dale as the winner of its annual wilderness images contest, within the “young photographers” division, for his haunting picture of a coyote in silhouette atop a ridge, backlit by the setting solar.

Dale’s profound attachment to the pure world was virtually preordained.

His dad and mom are Richard Dale and Caitlin Cornwall. Richard is the founder and director of the Sonoma Ecology Center, a nonprofit centered on ecological analysis, training and preservation. Caitlin, a self-described “biologist who has now also gotten into climate and housing,” has spent almost three a long time on the heart in numerous integral roles, and is now its senior challenge supervisor.

In addition to mountaineering almost each weekend, the household would embark on summer time highway journeys to locations just like the Sierra Nevada or the Pacific Northwest. While he loves these components of the planet, Leo’s favourite panorama is the rugged coast of Marin and Sonoma counties – “’cause there are so many great opportunities for finding bobcats and coyotes,” he stated.

Along that coast, he added, these animals “are a little bit more habituated to people, so it can be a bit easier to have a longer experience with them.”

Late afternoon was yielding to nightfall at Point Reyes National Seashore on the day final January that he made his most outstanding picture. Dale had already taken some “classical” photos of a bobcat that day, some “pretty nice shots” that weren’t “anything special.”

Heading residence, he noticed the automotive of some fellow photogs, and pulled over to say good day.

Those photographers had been capturing a vividly noticed bobcat, however stopped because of fading gentle.

Dale determined to take some “panning pictures.”

Panning entails leaving the digital camera’s shutter open longer whereas “moving the lens with the subject,” he defined. “So the subject stays in focus and the background gets blurred out.”

That method allowed Dale to maintain working within the encroaching darkness: “Leaving the shutter open longer, you can capture more light.”

He’d solely been capturing that bobcat for a couple of minutes when it pounced on a gopher, then “did a perfect sort of run across an open area right in front of me,” with the prey nonetheless in its mouth.

“A lot of times when you’re shooting with the shutter speed that slow,” he stated, every part can look pretty blurry. It can create a cool impact nevertheless it’s typically tougher to inform what’s truly occurring. In this case every part got here collectively.

“I was really excited when I went back through the pictures and realized how sharp this shot came out.”

A month or two earlier, 1 / 4 mile away, close to the tip of the day, Dale had been scanning a ridge backlit by “a really beautiful, kind of perfect photography sunset,” with the solar “coming up beneath this higher fog bank.”

In that second a coyote made its unhurried means throughout the tableau, permitting Dale to seize the indelible picture that gained the National Wildlife Federation prize.

An solely youngster, Leo has “oodles of cousins,” stated his father. One of these cousins, 5 or so years older, has a preternatural reward for recognizing wildlife.

Leo “learned that from his cousin,” stated Caitlin – “how good you can get at spotting animals other people can’t see.”

And now, Richard added, with a smile, “it’s kind of annoying, when you take him out, you look out at a landscape and he’ll see five things before I see one.”

It was Richard was gave his then-6-year-old son a scratched outdated Panasonic point-and-shoot digital camera that was broken, “but still took pictures,” he stated.

Many upgrades later, Leo is now capturing with an OM-1, made by the corporate previously generally known as Olympus. OM cameras “have a smaller sensor, which I really like because it means the lenses are a lot smaller, so i can carry two camera bodies around, with two different lenses, and hike around and not have to worry about carrying a heavy system.”

Not that endurance is an issue for Dale, who was a powerful cross-country runner in highschool.

At Colby, he intends to double main in environmental coverage and economics.

His expertise and fervour for wildlife images – the place may that take him?

“I’m still not sure,” he replied.

“I’d love to be able to combine it with some of my environmental policy work in the future, but most of my interest is around climate change and the energy transition, which can be harder to directly link through wildlife photography.”

For now he stated, he’s letting his images “evolve on its own and sort of choose its own direction.”

That course, since he acquired residence from Colby on this vacation break, has typically been west, to the coast that calls to him like a siren.

As Caitlin famous on a latest, moist and gloomy afternoon, “he’s out there now.”

You can attain Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or [email protected]. On X @ausmurph88.