What does it take to win the Wildlife Photographer of the Year award?

Rule 1: Be the trend, don’t follow them

“What does it take to win the WPOTY award? Well, it takes a lot,” says underwater photographer Shane Gross, who has placed four times, earning two highly commended ‘Under Water’ images in 2018, the 2024 Overall Grand Title for The Swarm of Life, which also won ‘Wetlands, The Bigger Picture’, and the 2025 ‘Animals in their Environment’ win for Like an Eel out of Water. “I’ve become a better photographer over the years, but I also think my style and the style of the competition have unintentionally met,” he adds. “I’ve always focused on overlooked species, and in recent years the competition has moved in that direction, which I think is one of the reasons why I’ve become more successful. But a lot needs to come together to win. Your photo matters big time, but it also matters what else has been entered that year. So trends really do matter.”

Wim van der Heever, whose image Ghost Town Visitor shows a lone brown hyena wandering through the sand-filled streets of Kolmanskop, Namibia’s long abandoned diamond mining town, earned the 2025 ‘Urban Wildlife’ win and the Overall Grand Title after seven previous finalist placements, and he agrees that it pays to break new ground. “Don’t concentrate on what past photographers have done, concentrate on your own work,” he says. “Thinking this way brings out your creativity – it helps you observe the animal and its behaviour more carefully because you’re always looking for a way to change it up.”

Rule 2: Effort doesn’t equate to trophies

Shane says his 2024 Overall Grand Title image – a mesmerising swirl of western toad tadpoles beneath lily pads in Canada’s Cedar Lake – was pure fun to create, while his 2025 winning image was much harder. On D’Arros Island in December 2022 with his Z6 and NIKKOR Z 24-70mm f/2.8 S, Shane became fascinated by peppered moray eels that haul themselves on to land to hunt in the intertidal zone, a behaviour rarely photographed. “For the eel image, I poured in literal blood, sweat and tears, while the tadpole image felt easy and fun,” he says. “What that tells me is that the effort you put in doesn’t matter to the judges. What matters is how compelling the image is. Is it an image that blows you away the first time, but by the third time you’re bored of it? Or do you see a little bit more every time you look at it? That, I think, is what those two images have in common.

“Thinking about the rounds of judging, they’re going to want to eliminate any image that has a flaw in it early, because they’re trying to whittle it down from about 60,000 images down to 100. So if your image has a glaring flaw in it, don’t enter it. Then ask yourself, does it have impact? Does it have that extra little bit that adds to your enjoyment of seeing it time and time again? Because if it doesn’t, it’s not going to get through.”

Rule 3: It has to be something ‘new’

Aspiring winners are often told to’“think outside the box’, but what does that actually mean? “It could be a new environment, it could be a new-to-you species, or a new-to-you behaviour,” suggests Shane. “Your first photos of any animal will probably be the same as 10,000 others. That’s why you need to go deeper to capture something unique.” Pointing to his 2025 winning image, he adds, “I knew that this behaviour and the species has never been awarded in the competition before, so the judges are always looking for originality, in both behaviour and species. So anytime you have something original like that, I think it’s worth entering.”

Wim agrees. “I had a long chat with one of the judges, Andy Parkinson, this year, and one of the things he said that kept coming up during judging was, “We’ve seen that before”. So they’re absolutely looking for originality, for a new, fresh spin on the animal’s narrative. Is it telling a story about the environment? Is it telling a story about the animal’s situation? They’re always looking for that narrative. So coming up with a fresh idea on a subject that’s been photographed so many times is probably the biggest thing that will get you far in the competition.”

Rule 4: Don’t chase approval

With the judging panel changing every year, Wim says there’s no point trying to second guess a judge or cater for their tastes. “Every year they’ve got a new panel, so the only way I can respond to that is to be me. I can only photograph and present what I think is beautiful. Had I been choosing pictures for judges, I would never have chosen the hyena, because hyenas aren’t seen as ‘iconic’. People don’t look at them with warm affection, and so they don’t think they’re deserving of first place. But I love that picture. I love the story that the picture told – that there’s still beautiful wildlife to be found in derelict places, and that wildlife has a space living beside us. So I don’t try to impress judges. I just try to produce the most beautiful art I can possibly do with my limited skills.”

Rule 5: If at first you don’t succeed…

Believing in your own images also means sticking with them, even if the competition doesn’t recognise them straight away. “You are allowed to submit up to 25 images a year, and I max out every year, because you never know what the judges are going to go for,” says Shane. “I had entered my eel image the previous year, and it won nothing, and then this year it won. So it shows how different juries see things differently, and also what other images you’re being compared to, because it’s not just about your images, it’s also about what else is in the competition that year.”

After spending more than a decade repeatedly returning to Kolmanskop to capture the image he envisioned, Wim also knows a thing or two about perseverance. “I thought I wasn’t a very good photographer because, for all that effort, I’d got very little to show for it, and I’d lost so much equipment with desert storms blowing in, trashing my cameras and sensors. Anything that could go wrong did go wrong.” Not wanting to sacrifice newer kit, the winning image was captured on a low-mounted Nikon D810 with a NIKKOR AF-S 17-35mm f/2.8 lit by two SB 800 flashes and triggered by a precisely tuned Camtraptions sensor. “I just kept thinking, ‘You’ve got to keep trying.’ Imagine you get the image. Imagine that one-off chance of photographing a hyena in front of one of those buildings. So I had to keep trying and then, finally, I got the picture. So keep at it, keep reimagining the scene you’re working with and don’t lose faith.”

And the (other) Nikon winners are…

Wim and Shane weren’t the only Nikon-using winners this year. The 2025 competition crowned Philipp Egger winner of ‘Animal Portraits’ with a closeup of an eagle owl’s glowing eyes in evening light. In ‘Behaviour: Birds’, Qingrong Yang captured a ladyfish snatching prey beneath an egret’s beak. In ‘Plants and Fungi’, Ralph Pace topped the ‘Underwater’ category with a shark egg case anchored to kelp, while Sebastian Frölich‘s macro view of a springtail floating among neon-green peat bog bubbles, won ‘Wetlands: The Bigger Picture’. Jon A Juárez took the Photojournalism award for his story on groundbreaking IVF work to save the northern white rhino, while Luca Lorenz earned the “Rising Star Award for his evocative portfolio. “What do I think it takes to win the WPOTY? I think the most important thing is to create photographs that you find the most beautiful and fulfilling,” says Luca, who submitted a range of images captured over the past seven years on his Z8 and D850. “I follow what I love most, and select images that feel the most unique. Images that show special behaviour, a new perspective or composition, or evoke emotion and tell a touching story – in short, images that have a chance of standing out among the 60,000-plus entries.”

For all the latest information about the competition visit the Natural History Museum website.

Opening image: Wim van den Heever, this year’s Overall Winner, captures a ghostly moment as a lone brown hyena moves through the crumbling ruins of an abandoned diamond mining town.D810 with NIKKOR AF-S 17-35mm f/2.8D IF-ED, 17mm, 15 secs, f/2.8, ISO 3200, ©Wim van den Heever, Wildlife Photographer of the Year