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NPOTY People's Choice Award - 2022
Name: Pascal Beaudenon
Picture title: Wild Flight in Manhattan
Category: People’s Choice Award
Nationality: Origin from France – Residence in Panama.
Occupation: Full-time photographer. With passion, as far as I can remember, around 14 years old, professionally since 1989.
Technical information
Camera: NIKON D500
Lens: SIGMA 150-600mm f 5-6.3 DG OS HSM Sports
EXIF: At 270mm – 1/1000s – f/8 – ISO 3200
PEOPLE’S CHOICE AWARD
Pascal Beaudenon | Wild Flight in Manhattan
Name: Pascal Beaudenon
Picture title: Wild flight in Manhattan
Category: People’s Choice
Nationality: Origin from France – Residence in Panama.
Occupation: Full-time photographer. With passion, as far as I can remember, around 14 years old, professionally since 1989.
Technical information
Camera: NIKON D500
Lens: SIGMA 150-600mm f 5-6.3 DG OS HSM Sports
EXIF: At 270mm – 1/1000s – f/8 – ISO 3200
Pascal says:
What a magnificent show of these flights of Canadian geese (Branta Canadensis) in the heart of New York City, one of the world’s largest megalopolis. They have made the city and its surroundings their home all year long. According to the NY Department of Environmental Conservation, 200,000 geese reside all year round in the state. A century ago, there were no resident geese, apart from a few descendants of captive birds set free.
Migrating geese were only seen between October and April but in the ’50s and ’60s, the department intentionally released this species in the region of Albany to establish resident flocks for hunters. « You gotta know what you’re doing when you let something go », said Tait Johansson, naturalist-in-residence at the Bedford Audubon Society. Ever since, and after the 1990s, the birds have been considered a nuisance for some, and the population is regulated through eradication measures.
On January 15, 2009, a few minutes after taking off from La Guardia, US Airways flight 1549 made an emergency landing on the Hudson river, after a flock of geese collided involuntarily with the plane. The idea behind this series is to show these two worlds from the angle of aesthetics, uniting the space and its urban structures with the local wildlife and its beauty.
This photograph was taken on November 23, 2019, at 8:29 am from the docks of Jersey City which faces the western side of downtown Manhattan. These two Canadian geese are flying at sunrise over the Hudson River towards Liberty Park, one of the places where they gather in peace…
Pascal Beaudenon
France / Panama
Before dedicating his photography to wildlife, Pascal worked as a Beirut-based photojournalist from 1989 to 2002 for Sipa Press Agency, covering the news in the Middle East as well as in former Yugoslavia, Georgia, Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and others. His work was published in Time magazine, Newsweek, The Sunday Times, Focus Magazine, Stern, Der Spiegel, Paris-Match, VSD, Le Nouvel Observateur, Le Figaro Magazine, Courrier International, Le Monde, An-Nahar, Al Hawadess, Al Ousbou al Arabi and others. In 2002, Pascal ended his career to dedicate his work to photographing nature and published, in 2005, The Other Lebanon, L’Autre Liban, a book of panoramic natural landscapes. His philosophy is that of the pursuit of aesthetics with the aim to raise awareness of the absolute need for conservation.