The natural reaction for many of us upon spotting an ant, termite, or other unseemly creature wandering around our homes is to run for a tissue—or the exterminator. However, despite their sometimes (literally) hairy appearance, insects are crucial to life on earth as we know it, and we are often oblivious to the magnitude of their impact. In a stunning new exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, Extinct and Endangered: Insects in Peril, renowned British macro photographer Levon Biss aims to illuminate the underestimated impact and importance of the humble bug.

Related: An introduction to macro photography

Zooming in on a critical catastrophe

According to the museum, insects are the most varied group of animals, making up 80% of animal life. Scientists have already identified over a million different species, with still more to uncover. Unfortunately, due to human activity, including climate change, many invertebrates now find their survival threatened. With excruciating detail, the images hope to change the way visitors perceive insects—not as pests but as vital members of the community that make life as we know it possible.

“Take away the world’s mammals and the planet would not look much different; take away just the bees and other insect pollinators, the ants and termites, and life on land could collapse,” says David Grimaldi, curator of the exhibition and the Museum’s Division of Invertebrate Zoology.

Related: Best macro lenses for Canon

The photographs

The exhibition showcases a collection of 40 macro photographs—some of which are up to 4.5 by 8 feet—that put in stark contrast the insects’ lilliputian proportions with their outsized impact on the planet. Each image on display is a composite of up to 10,000 highly-detailed individual photographs, and the result of three weeks’ work with a special camera and microscopic lenses. Biss worked with bugs from the Museum’s research collection and hopes viewers’ takeaway is twofold.  

“There are two sides to this exhibition,” Biss says. “There’s the beauty and the celebration of these creatures. But there’s also a somberness, when you marvel at these insects and start to understand that they are already extinct, or close to being gone, and the reason for that is us, primarily. I hope people will walk away from this exhibition with a realization that these animals are too beautiful to be lost. They are too important to be lost.”

Visiting the exhibition

The pictures all feature endangered or extinct species, from the monarch butterfly to the nine-spotted ladybug. They are on display in the Akeley Gallery and East Galleria, and visitors have access through their general admission ticket to the museum.

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After a decade of attempts, the European Union has agreed to implement new regulations that aim to simplify the way you charge all electronics. The upcoming law mandates the use of USB-C chargers for smartphones, cameras, and more. And though it carries no weight outside of Europe, it’s likely that its impact will still be felt globally.

Despite protests from the likes of Apple, which stands to lose lucrative revenue from the licensing of its rival Lightning connector, the new regulations are set to go into effect starting in the fall of 2024. The law covers most small- to medium-sized portable electronics and is composed of three main parts.

The new law has three main requirements

The first part of the new regulations mandates that USB-C connectors be used for all mobile phones, tablets, digital cameras, headphones, headsets, handheld game consoles, and portable speakers that are capable of charging via cable. Laptops will also be part of the law but are given a longer grace period for designs to be adapted.

The second part, meanwhile, requires that manufacturers support the USB Power Delivery protocol such that charging speeds are harmonized regardless of brand. Manufacturers would also be expected to provide clear information about their charging power requirements or capabilities on their product packaging.

The final section of the new law requires that all manufacturers offer product bundles that allow customers to forego the charger entirely. At the manufacturer’s discretion, bundles including the charger are still allowed, but only if a charger-free version is also provided.

There’s no mandate for a version with a bundled charger to be included, however. That being the case, most manufacturers will likely just stop including chargers in Europe, rather than complicating things by selling multiple variants of the same product.

Great news for consumers and the environment alike

While the news is likely being greeted with much gnashing of teeth at Apple, in particular, it’s a pretty clear win for the European public. Despite the company’s protestations that the mandate will stifle innovation in the oh-so-innovative cable and connector market, the reality is that the physical design of Apple’s own connector was laid down a decade ago.

One could make an argument for more notable innovation in Apple’s MagSafe connector, but variants of MagSafe have been on the market for more than 15 years and the idea predates Apple’s usage by years more. Clearly, there’s not a lot of actual innovation in this area and those few innovations can continue apace so long as compatibility between competing products is retained.

By standardizing USB-C/USB-PD design and requiring charger-free bundles, Europeans will no longer be faced with an ever-growing pile of incompatible USB chargers and cables that accompany each new gadget purchase. With customers able to use the same chargers and cables for all of their electronics, European landfills will less rapidly fill up with unwanted and discarded chargers and cables.

Existing products can continue to be sold unchanged

As noted, the law is expected to take effect for most products starting in the fall of 2024. Laptops are the only product being given a longer grace period, but these too will be expected to use USB-C chargers within 40 months of the other product categories. That should, in turn, put implementation of the requirement for laptops somewhere around the start of 2028.

Products that are already on sale will be grandfathered in and can continue to be sold. That wouldn’t apply to minor refreshes like the recently-launched Ricoh WG-80, though. Such refreshes would now also need to update the connectivity to comply with the new law. That could in turn have knock-on effects on other areas of the design, perhaps even requiring changes to the processing pipeline. (Cameras often rely on system-on-chip processors which have features like their USB support baked-in.)

If the scope of that change becomes too large, it could push the cost of the redesign too high to be worthwhile, resulting in older, lower-margin products like point-and-shoots being withdrawn without a replacement.

Markets outside of Europe are likely to be affected too

While it is entirely specific to the European market, it’s also likely the new law’s effects will be felt in other markets around the world. If manufacturers chose to treat other markets separately from Europe, that would increase their own development and manufacturing costs, after all.

In the interests of keeping their own costs to a minimum, we’d expect to see manufacturers standardizing USB-C globally once the law takes effect. Of course, product bundles already vary by market so it’s possible we could still see charger-only bundles outside of Europe, but that change will likely also become global over time.

Wireless charging could be the next battlefield

Although the law has yet to be formally approved, it seems that’s largely a ceremonial step. With the ball now set in motion, it’s unlikely to be overturned by manufacturers this late in the game. Already, the European Union has laid down tentative battle lines for the next stage in the war on waste.

While this iteration of the regulation covers only wired charging, allowances have been made for it to be revisited in the future. Two reasons for this are provided: To allow for developments on the wired charging front and also to initiate similar compatibility and sustainability requirements for wireless charging.

We can only hope that, too, comes to fruition. Wouldn’t it be great if all our products, wired or wireless, needed only a couple of chargers between them?

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If you thought the 61-megapixel Sony a7R IV delivered some serious megapixel punch, think again. The European Space Agency (ESA) recently shared the highest-resolution image of the sun ever captured —and at a whopping 83 megapixels, it outshines even the latest and greatest full-frame mirrorless titans. And in case you need further reference, the resolution of this photograph is 10 times better than that of a 4K display. 

How they did it

The Solar Orbiter, a joint mission between ESA and NASA, made the images using the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) and the Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment instruments (SPICE).

EUI is responsible for the highest resolution photo ever made of the sun’s disk and outer atmosphere (corona), while SPICE created the first image of its kind in 50 years using the Lyman-beta wavelength of ultraviolet light, which is emitted by hydrogen gas. 

At the time the images were made, Solar Orbiter was approximately 75 million kilometers (nearly 47 million miles) from the sun and Earth. The final EUI photograph is actually a composite of 25 tiles—at such a close distance and high resolution, many images were needed to cover the entire sun. The process took over four hours, and each image about 10 minutes. 

What you can see 

“EUI images the sun at a wavelength of 17 nanometers, in the extreme ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum,” the Agency explains. “This reveals the sun’s upper atmosphere, the corona, which has a temperature of around a million degrees Celsius.”

Looking at the EUI image, you’ll notice filaments jetting off at two and eight o’clock positions. That’s space weather for you.

“These ‘prominences’ are prone to erupt, throwing huge quantities of coronal gas into space and creating ‘space weather’ storms,” ESA says. 

The color photograph rendered by SPICE shares additional information about the sun’s temperature. Let’s just say, this is definitely not the place to spend a summer vacation.

“In the SPICE sequence of images purple corresponds to hydrogen gas at a temperature of 10,000°C, blue to carbon at 32,000°C, green to oxygen at 320,000°C, yellow to neon at 630,000°C,” the Agency notes. 

Unlocking a mystery

Solar physicists are using the information gathered by Solar Orbiter to decipher an age-old question: Why does the sun get hotter, instead of cooler,  in the upper atmosphere?

“Usually the temperature drops as you move away from a hot object,” ESA says. “But above the sun, the corona reaches a million degrees Celsius whereas the surface is only about 5000°C. Investigating this mystery is one of the key scientific objectives of Solar Orbiter.”

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Happy Earth Day, PopPhotographers! This week, we asked you to submit your best images of the elements (earth, wind, fire, and water) to celebrate and appreciate the beauty of our planet. The winners of this week’s challenge brought us to lakeside idylls, awe-inspiring cliffs and mountains, and the bellicose nature of fire. 

Today, let’s appreciate the beauty the Earth has to offer—and think about ways we can be kinder to the place we all call home. Whether you’re out volunteering for an environmental cause or are kicking back in the serenity of nature, we hope these images inspire and remind you that the earth is a pretty cool place to be. Let’s take care of it.  

If you want to submit an image for consideration, check the website, follow us on Instagram, or join our (NEW) Facebook group where we share the weekly theme on Mondays. 

Lead image by Myke Odoño. See more work here.

Prescribed prairie burn

Dave Lemoine’s image reminds us to never jump to conclusions. On first glance, I assumed (being from California) that this was a wildfire photo. However, his caption explained that this was, rather, a prescribed burn taking place in Missouri. Prescribed burns are a way of managing lands to reduce the potential for flammability later in fire season and can be quite effective. Lemoine’s photo conveys intensity, heat, and urgency. At once, the flames are a prelude of what could come should we not properly manage the land, and a call to act quickly before fire season sets a new record. 

Waterfront Inn sunrise 

Jill Dehlin takes us to a peaceful summer morning, when the sky is a sherbet orange and pink and somehow casts its serene glow on the lake, too. It’s the lonely two boats out on the water that spoke to me, an invitation to wade out in solitude to enjoy the spectacular beauty found in this small corner of the world.

Grazer Bergland

W. Schandor captures the peaceful grandeur of the rolling hills just north of Graz, Austria, which instantly made me think of “The Sound of Music.” After all, what better way to appreciate the beauty of nature than to run among the mountains and hills, gulping lungfuls of fresh air in the sunshine? Singing at the top of my lungs would only be a plus.

Morning at Grandview

Wind is a difficult subject to capture, but that’s part of the fun. How do you prove something’s existence when no one can see it? Hal Chen’s photograph of this spectacular valley made me feel the gentle wind on my face as it pushed the clouds along into the setting sun.

Portland Japanese Garden 

Trees always draw me in because of the soothing, swirling lines of their branches. Generous, lush, and impressive in the spring and summer, they are also melancholically poetic in the winter when stripped bare. Flickr user jayqzhu’s photograph asks us to submit to the glory and wonder of a venerable tree whose every twist, turn, and gnarled knot tells a story. 

Swiss Alps 

There’s no denying it: The Alps will always command a mysterious majesty that no words can explain. Antonio Valente brings us to an icy, forbidden wonderland to marvel. “I had to wait a long time before the fog allowed a glimpse of the mountain,” he wrote in the PopPhoto of the Day Facebook group. “Certainly my eyes have been rewarded!”

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Today is Earth Day, your annual reminder that this planet is all we’ve got. For Earth Day 2022, all of us—businesses, governments, and citizens—are being called on to “act (boldly), innovate (broadly), and implement (equitably)” with “everyone accounted for, and everyone accountable”. It’s a big mission statement, but one way that photographers can step up is by buying more used gear instead of new. 

Peak Design, the camera bag company out of San Francisco, is making things easy. For Earth Day it is redirecting its full site to its pre-owned market place. It got us here at PopPhoto thinking about why buying used makes so much sense. 

Upfront environmental costs

Unlike, say, cars, almost all the environmental cost of photography gear is front-loaded. The environmental toll of extracting the raw materials, manufacturing them into a camera, and shipping that camera around the world to the store where you buy it far outweighs the small amount of electricity it takes to charge the battery or the tiny amounts of extra fuel it takes to carry its weight with you on an airplane. 

What this means is that the environmental cost of used gear is essentially nil. In fact, it can even be net-positive as improperly disposed of e-waste is “polluting the planet,” according to the UN. By buying used—or by keeping your own gear for longer—you’re taking a very real (albeit small) step towards helping the planet. 

Used gear is good gear

It’s easy to get caught up in the hype surrounding the latest and greatest cameras and lenses. Here at PopPhoto, we’re at least partially guilty of fuelling it. But the reality is that you don’t need a $3,500 mirrorless camera—like the Canon EOS R5 or Sony a7S III—to take incredible photos. I still shoot with a Canon 5D Mark III and, a few weeks ago, Kaiman Wong posted a video extolling the virtues of the 14-year-old Canon 5D Mark II. Old cameras—whether you’ve had it for years or bought it used—can still be great cameras. 

And it’s not just the high-tech stuff. In fact, there’s an even greater case to be made for buying things like camera bags, tripods, and the other accessories used. They still have a front-loaded environmental cost—and, as long as they’re well maintained, they can’t go obsolete. (Hey, they can even go vintage!) 

Used can be a great deal

Let’s ignore the planet for a second—used gear can be great for your wallet too. 

In our article on the best used cameras to buy right now, gear editor Stan Horaczek points out that an older professional full-frame camera that’s built like a tank can cost less than a new all-plastic APS-C camera—and will still take higher quality pictures in most situations. The majority of photographers aren’t buying the most expensive high-end cameras so, when it comes to low- and mid-range stuff, the potential to get a better used camera is very real. 

Where to buy used gear

The internet has made buying used gear easier than ever. The internet’s big-box equivalents including Amazon and ebay have dedicated shops for refurbished goods. Reputable photo-centric sites like KEH, or the used departments at B&H or Adorama, also make it possible to buy used gear transparently—and often with a warranty. Lensrentals also has a cool program called Keeper where you can buy its used gear. You can even rent something and, if you like it, keep it and have the rental fee deducted from the purchase price. 

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To celebrate Earth Day 2022, we’re revisiting some of our favorite environmental stories and interviews from the PopPhoto archives.

From photography’s beginning until relatively recently, artists who turned their lenses on landscapes were fascinated by nature’s charm, mystery and beauty. By the mid 20th century, however, as a result of industrial activity, American landscapes took on other, less pretty, characteristics. Among the first modern photographers to point this out was David T. Hanson. His book titled Wilderness to Wasteland (Taverner Press, 2016) showcases pictures made in the ’80s that reveal the extent that the environment has suffered.

In some sense discovered by John Szarkowski, the late Director of Photography of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Hanson was honored with a show at the museum in 1986 at the age of 38. Its subject was Colstrip, Montana, a town near his boyhood home and the site of the largest strip mine in the US. Due largely to Hanson’s MOMA show, Colstrip became a poster child for the environmental desecration that industry was inflicting on American lands. The show secured the photographer’s status as one of the earliest and most prominent of contemporary landscape photographers who saw and interpreted their subjects not so much in terms of their inherent beauty, but, ironically, the ugliness perpetrated upon them.

Hanson wears many hats. He can accurately be called a documentarian, fine artist and an environmental activist. Born in 1948, this artist, writer, and teacher started out as an assistant to two of the greats: Minor White and Frederick Sommer. He took his M.F.A. in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he would ultimately teach from 1983 to 2000. His work is in the permanent collections and the subject of many exhibitions in the world’s major art museums.

The title of his new book, Wilderness to Wasteland, could summarize the central concern of his life. The book’s largely heretofore unpublished and un-exhibited pictures depict mostly western landscapes that after decades of irresponsible industrial activity have transformed into toxic dumps. The vocabulary used to describe his subjects says it all: Slag heaps, spoil piles, toxic pools and strip mines.

Wilderness to Wasteland showcases work executed as Hanson crisscrossed the country pursing multiple projects—often funded by public and private fellowships. It has four sections. The first titled Atomic City was completed in 1986 and is named for an actual town in Idaho. Near the site of the world’s first successful electricity-generating nuclear power plant, it’s sadly also the site of the world’s first partial nuclear meltdown, and years later, the world’s first—and America’s only—fatal meltdown, which cost three workers their lives. The region eventually saw over 50 mostly experimental nuclear reactors built, and is today one of the country’s most contaminated Superfund sites. Hanson says that it will probably remain so for centuries.

By the time of the photographer’s 1986 visit, Atomic City was largely abandoned, and his pictures of its uncared-for structures, unpeopled streets, and empty vistas strongly evoke a post-apocalyptic world partially bereft of humanity, beauty, and life itself.

The book’s second section, The Richest Hill on Earth, occupied Hanson from 1985 through 1987 and focuses on the extensive copper mines, workers’ housing, and individual neighborhoods that surround Butte, Montana. The town is home to what local promoters once called “the greatest mining camp on earth…[and producer] of two billion dollars worth of gold, silver, copper, and zinc.”

Hanson photographed Butte just after its mines had closed and its workers were dismissed. His pictures, again, have an eerie feel, utterly devoid of people, but rich in slag heaps, mine waste and dilapidated homes that, sadly, appear to still be at least partially occupied. Oddly, the town’s residential streets reach right up to and abut the mines with their above-ground conveyor belts, feeders, dischargers, and chutes. Presumably the miners rolled out of bed and continued rolling right down the mine shafts to work—almost like residing in an industrial plant.

The third section of Wilderness to Wasteland bears the same name, and Hanson created it while traveling across the country on a Guggenheim Fellowship between 1985 and 1986. Its subjects are hazardous waste sites, and he photographed them as he crisscrossed forty-five states in 12 months. As Hanson explains in the book’s introduction, “The series is wide-ranging in both subject and geography: Alabama farmland, real estate development in the Los Angeles basin, a Florida prison, oil fields in Texas, petrochemical plants in Georgia, abandoned mines,” and much more.

To our eye, the aerial views of toxic Superfund sites are especially powerful. At first glance, many could be taken for abstract expressionist paintings. One titled “Waste slag and irrigated cropland along the Jordan River, Sharon Steel Corp. Superfund site, Midvale, Utah”, is typical. The horizontal image is bisected vertically about mid frame, showing a ravaged landscape to the left, stained by pollutants and bulldozed into unnatural and unrecognizable gullies and gulches. Conversely, the right half presents lush green cropland representing a more recognizable natural scene, though we’re ironically aware that it’s probably drenched in pesticides and herbicides.

“I used aerial photography to gain access to high-security areas and to contextualize the sites within their larger surrounding landscapes, as well as to minimize my own exposure to these highly toxic environments,” Hanson says of these airborne views.

Twilight in the Wilderness makes up the book’s final pages and is a set of night photos of industrial sites related to energy production. Made between 1982 and 1983, they show oil tanks and refineries in California, Montana and New England. Hanson refers to these glowing pictures as Luminist landscapes after a 19th century school of landscape painters. The images carry titles based on original Luminist paintings from the 1800s. Hanson used the setting sun to sidelight reflective oil tanks, which glow like circular space ships landing against crepuscular skies. Equally eerie are sites lit by mixed light sources: faint daylight and bright moonlight, sodium and mercury vapor, tungsten and green fluorescents.

Though the book’s pictures were made some 30 years ago, the environmental issues they point to are still with us, and are more alarming and ominous than ever. Perhaps the most important role of these pictures is to illustrate what we risk by not paying attention to land management. If industrial interests are allowed to defile—and leave defiled—the natural environment, we will slowly turn the Earth into a place like those Hanson photographs, one uninhabitable by humans.

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To celebrate Earth Day 2022, we’re revisiting some of our favorite environmental stories and interviews from the PopPhoto archives.

Nick Brandt’s 2016 photo book, Inherit the Dust, was his visual cry of anguish about the looming apocalypse for animals habitats in Africa. If the killing of animals continues at pace, the elephants, rhinos, lions and cheetahs will all but disappear. “I am embarrassed to use this phrase because it’s so corny and clichéd, but I want to make the world a better place,” he says.

The English born Brandt is a self-acknowledged environmental activist who has been shooting exclusively in Africa making eloquent and emotional animal portraits for more than 20 years. (On This Earth, and a Shadow Falls Across the Ravaged Land.) As Brandt watched both the animals habitats and the creatures disappear, he realized he “couldn’t in good conscience keep making money from the animal portraits without taking action.” In 2010 he co-founded Big Life Foundation with Richard Bonham, one of East Africa’s most respected conservationists. Big Life partners with local communities and currently employs more than 300 rangers to protect animals living on more than two million acres of land.

That epiphany was also the genesis of the idea to erect life-sized panels of the animal portraits, place them in dystopian urban wastelands or industrial sites in Kenya where the animals once roamed, and create black and white epic panoramas of the scenes. The resulting images are simultaneously beautiful and horrifying, because they illustrate the irreconcilable clash of past and present. The animals represent a time when the African landscape, filled with a plethora of species, was primal and glorious and seeing it would fill even the most jaded of us with a profound sense of wonder. The present is a world eclipsed by poverty and desperation, exploding with population growth gobbling up every inch of land for people to live on, farm or mine.

Animals and humans are both struggling to maintain animal habitats. Brandt culled his outtakes, made life size prints in California and built test flats 30 feet long on his property to see whether the animals looked correctly life sized. “Where you place the panel can totally change your perception of whether the animal is large enough,” says Brandt. When he was satisfied, the strips of images were shipped to Kenya to be mounted on site onto huge elaborately constructed wooden and aluminum flats. At times it took at least 23 men to install the flats to ensure they were level, tied down with sand bags, and the horizon lines in the animal images matched up with the actual horizon line in the scenes. With the flats in place, Brandt would wait with his Mamiya RZ67 Pro II for hours, sometimes days, for the perfect melancholy clouds and the ideal film moments. Later he meticulously stitched the images together in Photoshop to create the huge panoramas of animal habitats that were published by Edwynn Houk editions in a 13 by 15 inch book.

“The really tough part was waiting for the clouds,” says Brandt. “I went in the rainy season, but it is still Africa and you can go six days in a row with sunshine and no clouds. I had no choice but to wait, hoping that when the clouds finally came, something else interesting was happening in the frame.”

Film seems like a risky choice for a very expensive three-month location shoot in various African animal habitats. To ensure that his exposures were right, Brandt flew someone to London every couple of weeks to hand carry a couple hundred rolls of film to a certain small lab where film is still processed by hand. Even though the returned contact sheets assured him that the exposures were fine, it wasn’t until he was back home in California, scanning negatives, and deep into post production that he knew whether the focal planes of each frame aligned with the next so he could create the seamless panoramas. The obvious question is why not take the easier and safer digital route? Brandt’s answer— characteristically brash and irreverent—is that digital “stone cold” bores him. “Film just turns me on,” he writes in his book. “I covet the glorious surprises that are sometimes achieved by the magical interaction of light and film negative.”

He is turned on not just by the magical interaction of light and film, but also the serendipity of what happens when events are left somewhat to chance. On the first couple of days Brandt attempted to control every minute detail of the animal habitats, not surprisingly, since he is demanding, obsessive and meticulous. He hired a cast of locals to direct, but almost immediately, he realized it wasn’t working. “We were calling ‘action’ but what was happening was complete crap, just so staged and stilted that I realized the scene couldn’t be directed,” he says. “I decided to place one person somewhere in the frame for a size reference and wait for that perfect moment of staged and spontaneous action and interaction.”

Sometimes interaction meant no action with the picture at all. In most of the images, the contemporary figures move through the frame, picking up garbage, sniffing glue, and just walking down the street, seemingly oblivious to the large animal photograph, as if the animals were already ghosts. In one of the saddest images, “Alleyway with Chimpanzee,” a solemn chimpanzee sits with its head lowered in a trash filled alleyway next to what looks like a stream of fetid sewage. “The actual portrait was originally a quite neutral photograph, not particularly moving,” says Brandt. “In the new context, the chimpanzee seems to be lamenting the world in which it now finds itself.”

In one of the most compelling images of animal habitats, “Underpass With Elephants (Lean Back, Your Life is On Track),” Brandt has installed the image of a family of elephants under an overpass. New construction rises in the background, while homeless people anchor the foreground. Some are sleeping while others sniff glue out of empty water bottles. On the left side of the frame a toddler seems to be walking towards the elephant image. On the right, a very small child has walked up to the image, trying to touch the elephant’s trunk. In the distance we see a billboard of a man relaxing on a bench with the ironic slogan, “Lean back, your life is on track.”

“Nothing compares to the excitement of shooting on location when the unexpected happens,” says Brandt. “In the ‘Underpass with Elephants’ image suddenly on the right side of the frame this little child walks up and touches the image. It was one of those ‘where the hell did he come from’ moments.”

The urban animal habitats, where the huge panoramas exist, were not easy to work in. The crew spent 12 days at a dumpsite in Kenya, which was a toxic, smoking pile of waste where locals scavenge for food. In one image from this dump, “Wasteland with Lion,” the flat has been installed so the lion appears to be lying in the trash, lethargically surveying the wafting smoke and the people picking through the dump for scraps of food. In the case of the lions, H=humans have destroyed both the animal habitats and the human living situation.

One of Brandt’s favorite images, “Wasteland with Elephant,” was taken in the same dump. The image of a large old elephant with ragged ears that mirror the ragged edges of the flat looms large on the left hand side of the frame. The flat was installed deep so the elephant’s foot looks as if it is touching the actual foreground and he is walking out of the flat into a world in which he knows he cannot survive. The image garners emotional resonance from the sky, layered with light clouds just at the horizon, but dark gloomy clouds at the top. It produces a foreboding image of animal habitats.

“This is a really great example of how under a cloudy sky not all light is the same,” says Brandt. “The stormy clouds in this image inform and affect the light on the ground. There was something apocalyptic about the combination of the rising smoke and the clouds, even though not much is going on with the people who almost blend in to the landscape.”

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The changes humans are wreaking on the environment continue to be an underlying theme of many of the photography competitions we feature here on Popular Photography. But it’s the major theme for the 14th annual Environmental Photographer of the Year Awards—the winners of which have just been announced to coincide with the COP26 climate change conference. 

About the competition

The Environmental Photographer of the Year contest “celebrates humanity’s ability to survive and innovate and showcases thought-provoking images that call attention to our impact and inspire us to live sustainably.” 

It’s always interesting to see themed competitions like this. Environmental photography isn’t exactly a traditional photographic genre—instead, it’s up to photographers to approach the subject matter as they like. Many of the winning shots sit at the intersection of documentary and landscape work, while others use more structured compositions. 

There are seven categories with the winners chosen by the jury, they include:

• The Environmental Photographer of the Year Award.
• The Young Environmental Photographer of the Year Award.
• The Resilient Award, which is given to “a single image that incorporates a compelling narrative that educates, spreads hope, and inspires action.”
• The Environments of the Future Award, which is given to an image that shows “the resilience of people and environments facing adversity and rising to the challenges of environmental destruction, energy security and the conservation of our natural resources.”
• The Sustainable Cities Award, which is given to images that showcase built environments and “the connections between nature, society, and infrastructure.”
• The Climate Action Award, which is given to an image that “demonstrates the human connection to the natural world and our actions to preserve it.”
• The Water and Security Award, which is given to an image that “explores our ever-increasing demand for water and the role of equality in every aspect of water management from water scarcity to flooding.”

And there is also a People’s Choice award that you can vote on right now. The winning photo will be chosen on December 1st. 

Environmental Photographer of the Year

Antonio Aragón Renuncio, a Spanish photographer, took the top prize of £10,000 ($13,425) and the title of “Environmental Photographer of the Year 2021” for his photo of a sleeping child inside a house destroyed by coastal erosion on a beach in Ghana. 

Young Environmental Photographer of the Year

Amaan Ali picked up the title of “Young Environmental Photographer of the Year 2021” and a Nikon Z camera for his shot of a boy fighting forest fires in New Delhi, India. 

I don’t say this lightly, but I think this is one of the rare situations where the winner of the youth prize could well have won the overall competition.

The Resilient Award

Ashraful Islam won the “Resilient Award” for this shot of a flock of sheep searching for grass to eat on parched, cracked soil in Bangladesh. 

Environments of the Future

Michele Lapini won the “Environments of the Future Award” for this aerial photo of a flooded house in Modena, Italy. 

Sustainable Cities

Simone Tramonte won the “Sustainable Cities Award” for this shot of a photobioreactor that produces sustainable astaxanthin products in Iceland. (Yes, I had to Google it too, but it’s a heck of a photo.)

Check out the rest of the photos

You can check out the other 40 finalists over on the Environmental Photographer of the Year website. You can also vote for your favorite to win the People’s Choice Award.

There’s no word yet on how to enter next year’s competition. But if it’s anything like this year’s, it will launch sometime in March with entries closing at the end of July. Oh, and it will be free to enter which is a big deal given the quality of the prizes. 

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Ilulissat, 2014

February 2016 smashed previous temperature records and globally it was the warmest month ever measured—1.35 degrees Celsius above the long-term average, according to data released by NASA. As the planet’s temperature is surging and storms are becoming more powerful, the conversation no longer seems to be focused on whether or not climate change is real, but rather, how quickly climate change is happening. The state of our natural world has become absolutely impossible to ignore, which is why it was imperative for the team behind FotoFest to center their 16th biennial around the topic.

“Everything that the industrial age established is now on a huge growth cycle,” says Wendy Watriss, one of the founders of the Houston based FotoFest. “People are concerned with the environment, and the lack of discussion of the need for economic restructuring, [this] continued emphasis on growth, growth, growth. The development of newer more environmentally friendly materials are not going to be able to keep up with that.”

This troubling unanswered question is what led Watriss, her co-founder Fred Baldwin and Executive Director Steven Evans to select the environmental theme of their 2016 FotoFest Biennial, Changing Circumstance: Looking at the Future of the Planet, which kicked off in Houston last weekend. The city-wide festival features work from more than 30 photographic artists who examine the dynamic changes our planet is currently undergoing.

Documentary work mixes with conceptual art in this expansive biennial with participants exploring wide-ranging themes: abstract images that celebrate the sublime beauty of our natural world share gallery spaces with brutal reportage projects that reveal the deep scars humanity and industry has carved into this planet. The mixing of moods at FotoFest is clearly intentional, but rather than feeling schizophrenic it gives the exhibitions a holistic feel.

“It was our goal to show the interconnectedness of these subjects and issues and also to show different approaches,” says Evans. “Often you don’t see these approaches rubbing up against one another, talking to one another. Breaking down those kinds of boundaries helped us tell the story.”

Watriss adds that she believes having traditional documentary work presented along conceptual artworks strengthens the message of the biennial as a whole—that it’s time to allow humanity to see the earth on its own terms. Her husband and co-founder, Fred Baldwin, has a slightly different perspective. People are sick of hearing the bad news—they have become desensitized to images polar bears on melting ice cubes. But if the bad news is delivered in a surprising way it may reach deeper and encourage people to change their behavior.

“If you look at old 12th and 13th century editions of the bible that were handmade they are gorgeously illuminated—all of the bad news is delivered in the most beautiful way,” he says. “Strategically, that is not a bad concept. We’re in the storytelling business and rather than a didactic implementation of facts we are trying to slip it in to the consciousness of people looking at the exhibition, every way we can think of to slip it in we are trying.”

American Photo made it down to Houston to check out the opening weekend of FotoFest, which runs through April 24. These are some of the projects that we found particularly impressive.

Feidheim Renewable Energy Village, Brandenburg, Germany, 2013

Ilulissat, 2014

762 Marine Debris Footballs

Three Vulnerable Cape Vultures, (Gyps coprotheres), Colorado Springs, Colorado, 2013

Ek Rupaya Bada Gilass (One Rupee for a Big Glass), 2009

Zukiswa Gaca, Khayelitsha, Cape Town

COMMUNAL SUNDAY PRAYERS, City Deep, Johannesburg, 2013

Red T-Shirt, Baseball Jacket, Car, 2012

Highway #1

Flamin’ Hot Monolith, 2013

Sorting Plastic Bottles, 2010

World Processor

Dubai, UAE, 2009

Thirst, 2009

10768, 25 June 2013

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Last summer when the world learned that a lion known as Cecil had been killed by a trophy-hunting dentist from Minnesota, the blowback came swiftly. Although it’s common practice for American hunters to travel to places like Africa and pay large sums of money for the privilege of slaughtering animals, Cecil happened to be a collared lion, one who lived on Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park and was part of a multiyear study run by the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit at Oxford University.

Cecil wasn’t just any lion—he was one of the Park’s most popular and a lion whose life had been documented photographically by researchers for a number of years.

“The minute the story broke there was a desperate need to put an image or a face to the name,” says Brent Stapelkamp, a photographer and former researcher with the Hwange Lion Research Project. “It just so happened that I had spent loads of time with Cecil getting the best photographs I could. These are the ones the world has seen. Once people could see Cecil’s image, I think that really made a difference.”

According to Stapelkamp, these images were crucial in drawing international attention to Cecil and the long-running controversy surrounding trophy hunting of endangered animals. A selection of Stapelkamp’s photographs of Cecil and the other lions of Hwange are currently on view at Anastasia Photo in New York City as part of Hwange: Cecil’s Kingdom.

Stapelkamp began working on the research project in 2006, although he didn’t start seriously photographing the lions living in the park until 2008—once he had some decent camera gear and lenses. He says that using photography in conjunction with the GPS tracking collars was an excellent way to help identify and track the animals, essentially creating a visual record their lives. Stapelkamp also happened to be the last researcher to photograph Cecil before he disappeared, and he was thrust into the spotlight once it was discovered that the lion had been killed.

“I was a reclusive and elusive lion researcher and all of a sudden the world was literally calling me. I would sit up until the early hours of the morning waiting for interviews in different time zones,” Stapelkamp says. “It was not an easy time for me or my family as we came under loads of pressure from every direction, but I felt it was the best opportunity to speak up for lions.”

The images on view at Anastasia Photo capture the day-to-day life of Cecil and the other lions at the National Park—the “holy grail” shots of lions stalking prey are presented alongside quieter moments of lions bonding and napping on the grounds as well as images that capture how physically close these wild creatures are to manmade infrastructure.

“I would hope that my images speak of the vulnerability of the species and their landscapes,” says Stapelkamp. “Where we were once in their world, they are now in our world and struggling to survive on our terms. Dispelling the illusion of wilderness is interesting to me.”

Hwange: Cecil’s Kingdom will remain on view at Anastasia Photo through June 5.

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