Second Nature: Winners Announced for the 2024 Field Season Photo Contest

From a view deep beneath the surface of the ocean to one from atop a sun-baked sandstone turret, this year’s Field Season Photo Contest offered an extraordinary range of scenic submissions — the most in the contest’s three-year run. The assignment: to show off summer research, learning and outdoor adventures anywhere Aggies found themselves outdoors.

See the gallery of photo entries from this year’s contest.

The event, sponsored by the Quinney College of Natural Resources showcased the incredible views that university students, faculty and staff from multiple colleges experienced during their summer season, along with the exceptional skills they used to capture them on camera. The contest attracted more than 400 entries — featuring sage grouse in flight, colorful snakes basking in summer sun, research on wetlands of an Alaska coast, hyenas at breakfast and more.

Winners were selected in five categories: landscapes, wildlife, people, closeup, a judge’s choice award, and a category organizers called “Awesome, Awkward and Amazing” to capture serendipitous moments caught by luck, skill or coincidence.

This year’s overall winner, Horacio Pedro Blanchard, from the department of Wildland Resources, captured a strikingly scenic moment in the backcountry of Argentina during a horseback trail ride. The judge’s choice winner, Phil Saporito from QCNR’s Watershed Science department, caught a lively conversation between a family of Clark’s grebe.

The winning entry in the landscapes category, taken by Adrienne Stanley, was created while doing research on cyanobacterial blooms in the Wind River range. The best entry in the wildlife category, from Haley Munson, featured an ermine with a lot of attitude. Hunter Hickock illustrated remarkable detail with a snail making its way across pine duff to win the closeup category

Taking first place in the people category, Andrew Kulmatiski submitted a striking image on a precarious sandstone turret. Alyssa Regis from the Utah Water Research Laboratory won the Awesome, Awkward and Amazing category with an image she took while visiting inverted towers in Portugal, thought to have been used for freemason rites.

“The judges were really impressed by the variety of locations that people explored during a relatively short summer season,” said contest coordinator Emmy Noel. “USU students do really amazing things, and that actually made it really hard to choose just a few winners. Getting this kind of personal perspective into how Aggies get to see the world, to view natural systems, is a real privilege.”

Motivations for participating in the contest were as varied as the images submitted. Biology major Laura Patterson said that she became very interested in photographing insects and other small invertebrates while in New Hampshire for an internship over the summer. QCNR student Lily Webb said she found that sometimes the best way to deal with anxiety is to take her camera out into nature, which was the impetus for her remarkable photos.

The winning photos and runners-up will be featured this year on campus screens and the gallery in the Natural Resource building atrium on the Logan campus.