10 superb pictures from Nature Photographer of the Year 2019

A cheeky duck and a majestic arch of the aurora borealis are among the magnificent photographs honoured by the 2019 Nature Photographer of the Year competition.

The competition — which only started up a few years ago — may not have the same high profile or lengthy history as the Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, but it still attracted 14,000 entries from 73 different countries.

The overall winner was this incredible shot of a pair of hares by a Hungarian photographer named Csaba Daróczi.

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@daroczics is the Nature Photographer of the Year 2019! What a great edition of the Nature Photographer of the Year competition! After all the action and energy yesterday and today at Nature Talks Photo Festival, we finally got some time to look back at this year’s edition of the Nature Photographer Of The Year. And what an edition it was! 14.000 photos from over 73 different countries! A really great quality of both photos and photographers. Great names, rising stars and incredible shots. Yesterday we had the award ceremony so please have a look at website where you can see all the results, the highly commendeds, runners up and winners of all the categories, and of course the overall winner, the Nature Photographer of the Year 2019: Csaba Daróczi from Hungary. Thank you all so much for joining the competition and sending in all your striking images, thank you so much to the jury who had a great time going through all those images and of course thanks to the partners and sponsors who made it all possible! We hope to see you again next year. The competition for NPOTY 2020 will be open again for entries from December 2019. • • • • • #naturephoto #naturephotography #naturephotographer #npotycontest #photocontest #photographycontest

A post shared by NaturePhotographerOfTheYear (@naturephotographeroftheyear) on Nov 13, 2019 at 6:32am PST

Csaba was taking a walk in Kiskunsag, near the village of Bócsa, when he spotted a colony of rabbits and started taking photos.

‘After a while I saw them jumping high in the air, especially when they were fighting over food,’ he explains. ‘When I saw that, I realised that I wanted to take that photo immediately.’

Csaba returned many more times to take pictures of the rabbits, including this one — which won him the €3,000 first prize.

‘This photo is proof of the fact that you don’t have to get an extremely rare or extraordinary species in front of your camera to be able to create a great nature photo,’ said Keith Wilson, chair of the judging panel.

If you’ve taken a picture you think could appear on this page, you’ll be interested to hear that from 1st December 2019 you can enter photos for Nature Photographer of the Year 2020 via www.naturephotographeroftheyear.com.

The website also has more of the images that won prizes or commendations in the awards — we’ve picked our favourites on this page to give you a taster.