A kangaroo performing air guitar was named grand prize winner in the world’s funniest photography competition.
Jason Moore of Australia came out on top with his ‘Air Guitar Roo,’ beating out 5,300 entries from 85 countries in the most closely contested voting ever.
Jason went to a field of wildflowers on Perth’s outskirts, where he saw a ‘mob’ of kangaroos—adults and young—feeding, playing, and what seemed like listening to music.
‘I instantly smiled when I saw this Roo striking the air guitar pose, and I knew that I had captured something really special.’
Jason took home several awards, including a safari in Kenya’s Masai Mara, after winning the Comedy Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition.
In an effort to develop a unique, entertaining, and free-to-enter photographic competition, professional
photographers and conservationists Paul Joynson-Hicks and Tom Sullam founded the competition in 2015.
Six categories were awarded, and 16-year-old Jacek Stankiewicz won the junior category with his
photograph of two greenfinches in Poland, titled ‘Dispute,’ which also received the People’s Choice Award this year.
The young Polish man claimed, ‘I saw this scene in the Bialowieza Forest while watching birds that looked like they were having an argument.’
‘This scene, according to my friends, is one child telling the parent that its brother did something wrong.’
Ten Highly Commended Winners were also announced, one of which was the French submission Snowball. Jacques Poulard recalls,
‘It was a very cold winter when I took this picture in Spitzberg, and the white grouse is coming to me and looked like a snowball with eyes.’
Delphine Casimir took ‘The Rainforest Dandy’ in a monkey forest in Ubud, Bali.
Captured at Westerfolds Park, an unexpectedly untamed area in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia,
this joey decided to go silly and give boxing a go while a group of kangaroos were taking
advantage of the early sunshine.
And lastly, a heartwarming winner from the UK was this gannet family. About 500,000 seabirds utilize the Bempton chalk cliffs,
which rise above the North Sea, as a breeding and roosting site each year between March and October.