Mathijs Frenken | Saturday

In a nutshell

Mathijs Frenken has been interested in nature and especially in birds from an early age. He loves to be at the mercy of nature’s whims and portray nature in his own creative way. It gives him a feeling of freedom. Showing how beautiful nature is and that we must protect it is what he wants to achieve.

With this lecture he hopes to inspire you to look for your own, creative, way to photograph nature (and therefore also birds). He does this based on his personal search for his own style to capture nature. How did certain photos come about? Which creative techniques did Mathijs use? How does he create images that invite the viewer to look longer? These and other questions will be addressed during this inspiring and educational lecture.

Andrew (Andy) Parkinson | Saturday

Animals in their environment

Stefan Christmann | Saturday

Penguin Love – A bond for live

Love. That is what Stefan Christmann‘s lecture is all about during the lecture – with a mix of photos and video fragments. And especially: penguin love. A term that describes the strong bonds that penguins create with each other to survive the brutal Antarctic winter. He tells about his time in Antarctica where he stayed to document the life cycle of the Emperor Penguins.

Receiving a photography scholarship from the North American Nature Photography Association in 2005 was a life-altering experience for Stefan. Working as a scientist in Antarctica in 2012, he used every free minute to document the life of a nearby emperor penguin colony. He returned in 2017 to complete a comprehensive body of work about one of nature’s most gripping survival stories.

Through his lecture you will learn all about the Emperor penguins, but also about the Antarctic landscape, the sea ice, the ice shelf and the effects of climate change on the habitat of the penguins. He will also show you how to get to Antarctica and what the research station looks like. In short: a lecture that moves you.

Audun Rikardsen | Saturday

Photography and science hand in hand – Winter Whales Feast

On polar nights when the sun never rises, the tumultuous Norwegian Sea barely reaches 4 ° C. The city of Tromsø is located further north, at a latitude that women and men rarely cross: 350 km above the Arctic Circle. But this is far from stopping Canon Ambassador Audun Rikardsen. In search of snapshots of Nordic wild life as we have never seen it before, he takes his rugged Canon bodies and L-series lenses to inhospitable conditions: for days, weeks and even months, they are subject to snow, hail and wind.

Audun Rikardsen comes from a small fishing village in northern Norway called Steigen, also known as ‘the Gateway to the Arctic’. Coming from the world of whaling, he was led to take the opposite view of the family tradition. He strives to understand nature and has the greatest respect for it. Combining his curious temperament and his great interest in flora and fauna, above and below sea level, he takes photos which have earned him international recognition for his creativity and his keen technical sense.

Audun Rikardsen is first and foremost a scientist, professor of biology at the University of Tromsø, Norway. With an image, like no other medium can, he shares his research with the whole world. And this is the strength of his photographic work.

Some of his most successful photos can be attributed to his scientific knowledge and savvy approach to animal behavior. But he owes many other successes to his daring, so true that Audun Rikardsen thrives by making the impossible possible. “It’s not lucky,” he says of his most congratulated photos. We could rather qualify this man as eternally dissatisfied; Audun Rikardsen is always on the hunt for the perfect shot. He leaves his equipment in mountain shelters for months to photograph eagles in their nests; he plunges his cameras into icy waters to immortalize whales crisscrossing the seabed and he places his lenses face to face with polar bears … To produce as many captivating and educational images on wild life.

“Have you ever wondered what it feels like to be a fish staring in dread at its approaching predator?”. This type of questioning has enabled Audun Rikardsen to take some of the most remarkable photos. It has often been thought that visions and points of view inaccessible to the human eye could become accessible through carefully positioned objectives.

Here, the scientist-photographer tells us about the challenges he took on during his photo expeditions in the Arctic. He also presents the essentials of the profession and reveals the secrets of his prowess.

Marcel van Kammen | Saturday

Bird photography: easier than it looks

How many bird photographers use their wide angle when they see a redshank on a pole? Marcel describes himself as stubborn and he certainly has that own way. As a nature photographer who mainly photographs birds, it is difficult to be unique, but you can pick out the ‘van Kammens’. Not that he gets the gift, not always in any case. Sometimes it takes many hours before the desired image is actually on the card, but then it is an image of great quality!

He never gets bored with birds, each time he discovers new things in their behavior. You can see how ingenious the animal world actually works and you marvel at how they get everything done without the techniques that we as humans have available. The nice thing about bird photography is that birds cannot be directed. He is a photographer who stands out in terms of composition and his own view on photography. His photos are always slightly different. Thinking out-of-the-box is important in bird photography.

Marcel van Kammen has been interested in nature and birds from an early age. He wants to open people’s eyes and hearts with his photos. To show the beauty of all living things, both large and small. Marcel hopes that his photos inspire people to protect vulnerable nature.

In his lecture, he demonstrates that you can take the most beautiful pictures of fairly everyday and common birds, such as the blue tit. He shows how much fun it is to dive into your subject for a longer period of time, to capture your subject in completely different ways and to experiment. And so you can capture very ‘normal’ subjects in a special and unique way!