The winners of the 2011 Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards were announced at a ceremony in London earlier this month. This competition is the biggest of its kind, and the awards are highly coveted among nature and wildlife photographers worldwide.

I’m always pleased to see familiar names among the winners. This year, fellow evolutionary biologist Alex Badyaev, a professor at the University of Arizona, won the “Urban Wildlife” category with a beautiful image depicting a young boy gazing in wonder at a tiny bat flying outside his window. I have followed Badyaev’s photography for several years, and I am always impressed with the depth of his photographic explorations into the lives of animals. I encourage you to spend some time perusing his website, which has some truly extraordinary animal behavior images. Badyaev kindly agreed to a short interview for the Day’s Edge blog, which I’m reproducing here:

NL: You capture some fascinating animal behavior in your photographs! It’s clear that you have spent an enormous amount of time with some of your subjects (e.g. flying squirrels, shrews, spotted sandpipers). How do you choose these “assignments” for yourself, and how do you approach the serious task of documenting behavior that’s never been photographed before?

AB: Essentially all of my wildlife photography is part of my scientific projects. Most often, photographing a particular fascinating phenomenon launches an in-depth research project, such as in my recent obsession with aerodynamics of hunting bats and mating flying squirrels; other times, research projects suggest what should be photographed in the wild, such as in our long-term projects on the evolution of rapidly dispersing bird species or shrews’ life history.

As to approach: I photograph because I want to know everything about a particular animal, and everything at my disposal – reading all the primary literature I can find, sketching in the field, long hours of observations – goes into preparation. A good photograph for me captures the essence of a particular species – in a sense it is the summary of all the knowledge about what the animal does and is.

NL: Your winning image, “Boy Meets Nature,” shows a boy looking out a window as a bat flies by outside, frozen in time. Learning the habits of the bats was obviously key to making this photo happen. But as a photographer, I’m equally impressed by the lighting — if you don’t mind sharing your secrets, how did you manage to light the scene properly and balance the interior and exterior lights?

AB: To capture the scene, I needed to reconcile warm “slow” light of the cabin with the necessity to have “fast” light right outside the window to freeze the feeding of the tiny Myotis bats. There are several ways to accomplish this. The simplest, used here, is to expose for the internal light — the table lamp here — but use a very short range flash outside the window to take the bats out of the complete darkness of late summer night. The flashes set for the fastest output (about 1/32 of the full flash here — you can barely detect it with your eyes) is what is needed to freeze the bats and moths. A remote external flash with such an output will have a range of about 2 meters, it sits here above the window, hooded and pointing straight down.

Biologically, this image works because satin moths that come to the window for a few nights in August are exotic to local bats and are not palatable. It takes the bat colony few days to learn this, but in the meantime they hover over the moths echolocating nonstop and trying to figure them out. This predictability of the hovering distance from the window enables manual pre-focus that, with great depth of field, simplifies night photography considerably. The kid standing on his bed under the window and making his way into the frame for a moment was an added bonus. My title for the photo was “Bedtime TV.”

NL: You’re a professor in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. Academic faculty are some of the busiest people I’ve ever met! So how do you manage to make time for photography? What advice would you give other scientists struggling to fit photography or other outreach activities into their lives?

AB: Well, I have always thought that there are unfairly few hours in a day. And I have always spent a long time observing animals. That’s when I think, get inspired, learn, come up with my best scientific ideas. So there is no conflict. There is no question, however, that I would be a much better nature photographer if I could only skip the administrative commitments that come with a faculty job…

I find a compromise between science and photography because one is enhancing the other in my work and both really exist in synergy for me. Science and photography are similar in the sense that you get better at both by figuring out your unique combination of background, interests, and approaches.

NL: Among the other images recognized in the Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, do you have a favorite? If so, what makes this image your favorite?

AB: This is a tough one. This year’s winning images are very strong. I love “Illusion” by Stefano Unterthiner and “Harbinger of spring” by Sandra Bartocha. Both are extraordinary artists and I have followed their work for years. Both images just stop you dead in your tracks. I can smell the air in the snowdrops’ photo – this is an image straight from my childhood. “On the tracks of a coyote” by Martin Cooper was all around London advertising the exhibit. I love that image!