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The winners on the Sony World Photography Awards 2026 have been revealed, and as soon as once more the celebrated contest, which this 12 months attracted 430,000 entries from over 200 international locations and territories, was filled with unbelievable images and tales.
I used to be lucky to get a sneak preview of the exhibition — which is open to the general public at Somerset House in London till May 4, 2026 — and its 300 plus works, to listen to from the ten class winners and attend the glitzy award ceremony. And better of all, I had the chance to sit down down with the Wildlife class winner Will Burrard-Lucas to debate his ‘Crossing Point’ collection created in Kenya’s Masai Mara nationwide park.
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‘For nocturnal creatures, there’s nothing better than camera traps’
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Will Burrard-Lucas’ wildlife photography is captured using a variety of setups, from daytime shoots with Sony mirrorless camera gear in hand, to camera traps paired with ‘old secondhand DSLRs’ and left in place for long periods — the latter was his approach to the ‘Crossing Point’ project.
Low-cost trail cams are ideal for recording wildlife, but the image quality is typically poor and not detailed enough to distinguish specific animals. Burrard-Lucas, on the other hand, uses top-quality camera gear, paired with his self-developed camera trap system.
Burrard-Lucas’ camera traps are his own ‘Camtraptions‘ gadgets, and are based mostly on a extremely superior movement sensor — the most recent model being the end result of years of growth — which works with plenty of main digital cameras for wired or wi-fi operation.
For this undertaking, Burrard-Lucas wirelessly paired the movement sensor with a full-frame Canon EOS 6D DSLR digicam (fitted with a 35mm lens), which in flip remotely triggered three off-camera flashguns. As he tells me, “Any old DSLR camera works really well in the camera trap setup — it [the camera] needs to work well with flash, which is where a lot of mirrorless cameras fall down.”
He had entry to closed-off areas of the nationwide park the place there are a focus of notably uncommon wildlife species, together with rhino — that are notoriously shy. A brook surrounded by lush vegetation was the stage for the very important undertaking, an uncommon setting for a park usually identified for its extensive open plains. “The moment I saw it, I knew it was the right place,” Burrard-Lucas says.
The digicam was mounted to a tripod and protected against the weather and was left in place for greater than six months; the composition that you simply see was determined on the very starting with a number of issues. The movement sensor is positioned to set off the digicam when the animal steps into the particular a part of the body, and the digicam’s focus is manually set to that spot, with off-camera lighting able to illuminate it in low gentle.
With such a undertaking, Burrard-Lucas does not want the most recent digicam gear with blazing quick taking pictures speeds and AI topic detection autofocus. No, he wants ‘dependable’ and ‘strong’ gear with wonderful picture high quality, and likewise that is inexpensive given the variety of digicam traps he units up and the environments he works in. Whenever he sees low-cost “old secondhand DSLRs, I snap them up,” he tells me.
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Many of the species that the park was notably eager to get extra information on are shy, nocturnal creatures, particularly rhino. As such, lighting is vital, and there are three flashguns positioned to illuminated the topic and speedy surrounding vegetation.
With the setup in place, Burrard-Lucas had educated the rangers to make a weekly examine on the gear, change batteries and obtain the photographs from the digicam’s reminiscence card, recent for one more week of motion-triggered seize.
The rangers believed a single rhino to be resident within the space, however over following months had been shocked to establish eight completely different beasts. Yet it was one other discovery that left them ‘shocked’ — when a kudu entered the brook someday. Kudu may be present in different components of Kenya, however till these distinctive nighttime photographs revealed their presence they’d not been thought to dwell within the Masai Mara nationwide park.
For photographing nocturnal creatures, there’s nothing higher than digicam traps
Will Burrard-Lucas
“You can never predict what’s going to show up,” says Burrard-Lucas, however over the course of six months his digicam photographed a variety of wildlife, from rhino to leopard, elephant, giraffe, the shock kudu and lots of extra.
For me, the fun of images is being there and experiencing what I’m photographing within the second, so I used to be eager to listen to how this different method of setting the stage forward of time for distant seize differed to when he is out with the digicam in hand, reacting to what he is seeing earlier than him.
“They both have their place for different species and different projects”, says Burrard-Lucas, “but for me, for nocturnal creatures, there’s nothing better than camera traps, because really it comes down to lighting.
“For these elusive animals, a photographer might wait 12 hours, however you may’t wait 4 months, so it is the one sensible manner if you’ve bought this outlined point of interest.” For other creatures that don’t stick to trails or are typically out in wide open savannahs, a camera trap is much less helpful.
I ask Burrard-Lucas about camera trap photography for beginners, and he tells me, “It’s tremendous simple, and so many individuals are making new use of their previous DSLR digicam. You do not want lots of further equipment; the sensor, a single flash to begin with, maintain issues easy and go away it out for a couple of nights.”
I would simply do that digicam entice setup for myself; Burrard-Lucas sells each merchandise wanted for it barring the digicam on his Camtraptions website, which additionally offers an in-depth how-to. Whether I can {photograph} something as thrilling as a rhino is a distinct matter, in fact — however it’s important to begin someplace.
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