About Me
Hi, my name is Ben Hancock-Smith, and I am a 20-year-old wildlife photographer from Surrey, Britain. Ever since I was very young nature has been my biggest interest and passion which is what would eventually lead to me becoming a wildlife photographer. It began with taking photos of animals I saw out and about with a phone and then when I was 12, I went on a trip to Richmond Park where I borrowed my dad’s camera to photograph Red deer, which was when the start of my passion for wildlife photography appeared. I borrowed the camera to photograph garden birds to begin with and used it on trips to local lakes, photographing waterfowl until I was 13 and bought my first camera, a Lumix DMC-TZ70, a compact camera. Although it wasn’t very suitable for wildlife photography and I still didn’t know much about cameras, I continued using it for a year before switching to the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX400V which I didn’t use for too long as a photo of a Roe deer I took with it won a youth category in a local photography competition where the prize was a Nikon Coolpix P900.
Bridge cameras were fine when starting out but had limitations and so towards the end of 2019 I bought my first DSLR, a Nikon D500. As soon as I got this, I noticed a significant improvement in my photography which was aided with the COVID lockdown in March as it cancelled my last year of secondary school and gave me a lot of free mornings to photograph birds at my local nature reserve. Even though I was still getting used to the DSLR and most of the images I took back then aren’t great, it provided an opportunity to learn more about the camera and different settings, discovering what worked and what didn’t. During this time, I got extremely lucky one morning in April when I had two Mute swans chase each other across a lake and although nowadays I would probably get a better shot of it, I still got one of my favourite photos I have ever taken, of the swans taking off from the water together. Over the course of the next couple of years, I kept trying to improve and going out looking for new locations and, in the Summer of 2021, I decided to try macro photography and bought a Sigma 105mm, this proved to be one of the best decisions I had made, ending up spending many evenings that summer out photographing invertebrates at sunset getting some of my favourite images. On one fortunate evening a couple weeks after I started macro photography, I was out looking for a barn owl that didn’t show up when I found my first ever wasp spider and couldn’t pass up an opportunity to photograph them, this image would then go on to be the overall winner in the 2021 RSPCA Young Photographer Awards out of 6500 photos, which was my most successful competition win.
Currently I am studying Zoology at the University of Exeter and living in Cornwall but am still going out looking for wildlife to photograph and continuing to improve whilst getting the opportunity to photograph wildlife in coastal areas which is something I haven’t done much of due to being from a landlocked area. Plus, I’ve also recently purchased a Canon EOS 5D Mark II in an Ikelite housing so that I can now photograph wildlife underwater and look forward to exploring a new environment with it.
