The Photo That Won Wildlife Photographer of the Year Is About Grief, Not Gear
What happened in this photograph?
Italian photographer Federico Veronesi was tracking elephants in the Huab River Valley of Namibia when he noticed an unusual pattern of drag marks in the sand of a dry riverbed. Following them led him to a family group, where a female emerged carrying a dead calf, its leg wedged between her tusk and trunk.
The image, rendered in black and white, won the Behavior: Mammals category and the grand title of the 62nd Wildlife Photographer of the Year. Behaviors centered on death, guarding the dead, inspecting bones, carrying the deceased, have been observed in both African and Asian elephants, and some researchers interpret them as possible displays of grief. The exhibition opens at London's Natural History Museum on October 16, 2026.
How did he find a moment like that?
He read the ground. Drag marks in a riverbed are not the kind of detail you catch while thinking about shutter speeds, and that is the point. Wildlife photography at this level is tracking and patience with a camera attached. The winning image was not made by superior gear; it was made by a photographer who noticed something odd in the sand and followed it.
That is the learnable part. Fieldcraft, the habit of reading sign, watching behavior, and staying longer than feels reasonable, is what separates memorable wildlife frames from lucky ones. Veronesi's photograph is proof that the camera is the last link in a long chain.
What can the other winners teach you?
The category winners are a technique syllabus on their own. The Natural Artistry winner by Michal Michalski used a slow shutter speed to turn a flock of birds into the illusion of trees still swathed in autumn foliage, proof that deliberate motion blur is a creative tool, not an error. James Lewin's Animals in their Environment winner frames a young bull elephant spraying zebras in Kenya's Chyulu Hills, a study in layering foreground and background. Francisco Negroni's photojournalism winner documents a dead puma in Patagonia's windswept grasslands, showing that wildlife photography includes loss, not just beauty.
Studying a year's winners is one of the fastest ways to build your visual vocabulary. Each frame is a solved problem: a light problem, a composition problem, a patience problem.
Why it matters for you
The winning photograph contains no new technique, and that is exactly why it won. It is a document of something real, found by someone paying close attention. Gear conversations will always be louder than fieldcraft conversations, but the frame that moved judges past tens of thousands of entries came from reading drag marks in the sand.
Next time you go out, spend the first hour without lifting the camera. Look for tracks, for patterns, for the thing that seems slightly wrong. The photograph you want is usually preceded by evidence, and the photographer who finds the evidence first gets the frame.