Vancouver Audubon Society (VAS) · What we liked, and a suggestion for taking each one to the next level
We are all on a journey to improve our photography. For each winning image below you’ll find what stood out and one constructive suggestion. Congratulations to every photographer — the work this year was a genuine pleasure to look through. — John Pugmire (VAS mentor photographer)
Cell Phone Nature
What Judges Liked: A sophisticated bit of color handling: the warm field, with its yellows pushing toward orange, plays as a true complement against the deep blues breaking through the sky, and for a phone capture the tones stay clean rather than tipping into an over-cooked HDR look. The composition reads in clear horizontal bands — golden field, a transitional belt of foliage and low-lying mist, then the dramatic sky — and the uniform lower edge gives all that drama a stable foundation. The hay bales add a quiet note of place and scale without dominating.
Next Level Edits: The one thing holding it back is balance: the foreground bush on the left carries real visual weight, and the bales — the natural counterweight — sit just left of center, so the frame feels slightly left-heavy. Bales a little further right (or a crop that shifts them rightward) would let the scene settle.
What Judges Liked: The reflection is the whole engine of this image — mirroring the autumn treeline in the still pond doubles the color payload and gives the frame a calm, meditative symmetry that depends entirely on the photographer waiting for water this glassy. It’s also technically disciplined: the horizon is dead level, the trees stand vertical, and they line up convincingly with their reflections, which is what makes the mirror read as effortless. The grassy bank in the lower left is a deliberate lead-in, and a low band of fog adds quiet drama and depth.
Next Level Edits: The sky is the one passage not quite pulling its weight — comparatively flat, with what looks like a faint green cast. A gentle, targeted correction to the blue showing through the cloud breaks (the clouds themselves mostly just want a little contrast) would let the whites read cleaner and the foliage oranges sing even truer. A restorative adjustment, squarely on the photographer’s side of the ledger.
What the Judges Liked: Textbook complementary color, executed at full strength: warm backlit grasses against the cool blues of the upper sky, with the low central sun letting that warm/cool split run the full height of the frame. What lifts it above the thousand competent sunsets it was judged against is the light itself — a defined starburst at the treeline and a ring of flare arcing into the foreground, giving the moment physical presence. The foreground grasses and teasel heads add tactile, you-are-here texture, and the contrast control — holding detail in both the shadowed trees and the blazing sun — is genuinely impressive for a phone sensor.
Next Level Edits: If there’s one refinement: the composition gives a lot of room to sky that goes quiet near the very top, and dropping the horizon a touch would let those rich foreground grasses carry more of the frame. A modest raise rather than a hard rule-of-thirds line — the blue above is still doing complementary-color work, so you want to shave the inert corners without losing the cool mass the warm foreground plays against.
Wildlife, Plants, & Nature
What Judges Liked: A difficult exposure handled with real control: a dark, wet raccoon in shadowed underbrush, with deep fur detail held without crushing to black and the lit head kept bright without blowing out. The shaft of light falling across the head is the whole story — it places the animal exactly where nature put it, skulking in the shade, while spotlighting the face, the mask, and two crisp catchlights that engage the viewer directly. The head sits on a thirds intersection, the full banded tail is kept in frame, and the wet-green tangle of habitat surrounds the subject without competing.
Next Level Edits: One observation a longtime long-lens shooter’s eye will catch: the foliage is sharp through the center and softens toward the left and right edges, at what looks like the same distance — and depth of field doesn’t behave that way; at a constant distance, sharpness holds evenly across the frame. The softness does the right thing, settling the eye on the raccoon, so the instinct is sound. The cleaner way to get there is a subtle vignette built from exposure and contrast, applied evenly across the frame — it guides the eye the same way while reading as a deliberate choice. Paired with a crop to 4×5 to shed the right edge, it tightens the whole image.
What Judges Liked: The title reframes the whole image: once you see the water’s surface as a painted ground — the horizontal smears of bokeh, the warm-and-cool wash, the reflection dissolving into the dark lower frame — the wood duck becomes the one fully-resolved figure on a canvas. That’s the photographer seeing the abstraction in his own background. The low, eye-level point of view is what makes it work, collapsing the distance to a floating bird and letting the reflection form, and the tonal control on a notoriously hard subject — iridescent green-and-purple face, hard whites, near-black accents all in one bird, in strong light — is the real achievement. A smart bit of frame-weight balance offsets the shadowy distant ducks on the left with a longer, slightly brighter run of water on the right.
Next Level Edits: To polish: the whites on the duck likely carry a faint warm contamination, so a gentle neutralize-and-brighten would make the facial striping read crisply white, and a small overall pop — lifted shadows, a touch of contrast — would give the bird a hair more dimensional presence. Keep any clarity local to the body and off the iridescent head, where it can turn the sheen harsh.
What the Judges Liked: A once-in-many-frames pose: a short-eared owl banking toward the camera with its wings spread to nearly equal length and mass, one swept up and one down, giving the bird a symmetry and power flight shots rarely catch. The eyes are the entire image — glowing yellow, staring straight down the lens, tack-sharp with a living catchlight — and the engagement is immediate. The soft warm evening light wraps the bird beautifully, and the background does the hard double job of isolating the owl while keeping just enough structure to say golden hour in a real place.
Next Level Edits: The one compositional adjustment: the eyes establish a virtual leading line straight toward the viewer and slightly downward, and a gaze line, like a motion line, needs room ahead of it. Adding space to the right and below the bird, and shedding about an eighth off the left, would let the owl fly into the frame rather than at its edge — weighting the open space toward the direction of attention.
What Judges Liked: The leading line here is textbook: it enters at the lower-left corner — the classic painter’s start — and climbs in an S that bends back left through the steps before implying a turn back to the right at the top, keeping the eye climbing and rewarding it with a ‘what’s around the bend?’ pull up the hill. The composition would carry as pure landscape even without the figures, which is the mark of strong bones. The two hikers, backs to camera, turn the viewer into a fellow climber ascending into the forest — genuine engagement rather than a pose — and the wide-angle perspective, with edge trees leaning inward and central trunks vertical, pulls you up a corridor of layered depth. The hewn-timber steps are a lovely example of the human hand cooperating with a place rather than paving over it.
Next Level Edits: The only soft spot is the flat, bright sky at the top — though it’s broken up by trunks and canopy reaching into it, so it functions as the destination glow the path climbs toward rather than empty space. A gentle highlight knockdown to keep it from pulling too bright is all it would want.
What Judges Liked: This is the rare People in Nature image that’s genuinely about something: the lone figure on the dike trail, the band of restored wetland, and the houses stacked on the ridge behind state the actual purpose of an urban refuge — nature carved out and protected inside the populated world, a few minutes from the subdivisions. The small-in-frame human is what creates the meaning; a larger figure would have been a portrait, while this one is a person dwarfed by and held within the landscape. The small punch of dark red on the jogger is the keystone — it’s what lets the eye find the figure at all against the muted oranges and steel-blue — and the clean horizontal banding gives the wide, quiet scene its stable structure.
Next Level Edits: Two adjustments: the jogger sits close to center, the weakest spot for a small subject, and shifting him roughly half the distance back toward the left edge would let him read as entering the frame and counterbalance the visual weight of the houses on the right. The sky is generous — trimming it would tighten the image — but it’s partly doing the work of dwarfing the figure, so a modest trim is better than a big one, judged after the figure is repositioned.
What the Judges Liked: Centering a subject usually drains tension, but here it’s the rare exception that’s right: the leaf-strewn path runs straight up the middle, the rider sits at the vanishing point, and everything converges on him, so the center is the destination rather than a static parking spot. The path is both a gorgeous leading line and a depth demonstration — leaves soft and painterly in the near foreground, crisping up to the tack-sharp rider, then diffusing into the distance — and a low camera position drops you into the leaf carpet for an immersive, on-the-trail feel. It nails the region as much as the category: the safety-yellow jacket, the mountain bike, the gravel rail-trail, the overcast sky with rain threatening. That bright jacket is the keystone that lets the eye find the small rider, and a second figure in the distance rewards a careful look.
Next Level Edits: To finish it: the bright sky on the right is pushing into clipping, and there’s an unnatural yellow tinge behind the right-edge tree. Recover what highlight detail is salvageable in that patch first, then apply a targeted desaturation of the yellow in the sky specifically — masked to the sky, not a global change that would touch the warm foliage you want to keep.
What the Judges Liked: The color is the immediate hook: the slate-blue crown and wings, rufous back, and buff breast with its neat black spotting — North America’s most colorful little falcon — rendered cleanly against a creamy background that happens to echo the bird’s own warm palette. The sophisticated touch is directional: the bird’s downward gaze runs parallel to the line of its tail, so the whole animal becomes a single arrow aimed out of frame, making you want to know what it’s looking at. The twig flexing under the bird’s weight adds a quiet bit of character, the background melts to painterly tone, and the eye is crisp with a catchlight.
Next Level Edits: The crop wants rebalancing. There’s too much dead space beside and behind the bird, away from where it’s looking. Pulling down from the upper right and letting the perch enter from the lower-right corner would anchor the branch as a deliberate diagonal, while keeping the open space in the lower-left — the direction of the gaze — gives the eye-line somewhere to travel. The aim is to weight the space toward the direction of attention rather than behind it.
What the Judges Like: The snake is the photo, full stop: a great blue heron with a garter snake speared and writhing in its bill is high-drama predation caught at the decisive instant — not a portrait of an animal but a story of one, the food web made visible. This is the kind of moment where ordinary critique gives way, because the interaction carries the frame. The placement is textbook, with roughly three times the room ahead of the face as behind the tail, the summer-meadow habitat of yarrow and yellow blooms is both lovely and recognizably a Steigerwald field, and the eye and bill are sharp where it counts.
Next Level Edits: The fixes are real but forgivable. The whole frame reads too dark, so lift the overall exposure first — it will bring the heron’s gray out of the murk, make the snake read more clearly, and let the meadow color sing. Then remove the single grass blade intersecting the bill right at the point of action, where the eye needs to land. One geometry note for next time: the bird’s whole body is angled slightly away from the viewer, and a body angled slightly toward the camera would give it dimensional volume and presence — with the head staying in strict profile, intent on subduing its prey, which is exactly right for the moment.
What the Judges Liked: This is the frame where a photographer’s craft consolidates: the buck is quartered slightly toward the camera so the body reads as a solid, three-dimensional form, while the head is up and facing us in direct, regal eye contact — body angled for volume, head turned for engagement. Here that eye contact is exactly right; this isn’t a predator absorbed in a kill but a portrait of a sovereign animal acknowledging you, and the title ‘Autumn’s Heir’ earns it. The antlers are framed with real care, rising fully contained into the open space above with warm light on the tines, and the soft golden backlight wrapping the buck — rim-lighting the fur and antler edges while holding full detail in the face and eyes — is tonal control at its most beautiful. A long-lens background melts the meadow to painterly bokeh, and the low, immersive perspective meets the animal eye to eye. It is, unmistakably, Steigerwald.
Next Level Edits: Finding a critique means reaching: the lower legs soften into the grass, but unlike a frame-clipped crop they read as natural concealment — an animal standing partly hidden in its habitat, honest to how you actually see a deer in tall grass. If pushing, the brightest highlight in the upper-right background is a touch hot and could be eased slightly, and the darkening along the bottom edge is a hair heavy — easing it would let the meadow light wrap all the way down. That is genuinely the whole list. A deserving first place, and one of the strongest wildlife portraits in the entire field.