The Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition was started in 1964 by the BBC and the Natural History Museum in London. For the 49th year of the competition they had an astonishing 43,000 entries from 96 countries, whittled down to 15 outstanding winners. The grand prize went to South African photographer Greg du Toit for his midnight blue portrait, titled “The Essence of Elephants” (pictured above). Shot by a waterhole in Botswana’s Northern Tuli Game Reserve, from a hide (a sunken freight container) that provided a ground-level view, Greg chose to use a slow shutter speed to create the atmosphere he was after and try ‘to depict these gentle giants in an almost ghostly way.’
