Meet Steve Berliner, Photographer

We are so fortunate to be able to utilize some of Steve Berliner's stunning photographs of local backyard birds on this website!

If you’re a newsletter customer of ours, you may have received a postcards with gorgeous bird photography—those images are also Steve’s.  When you tune into Oregon Public Broadcasting TV (Channel 10), be sure to watch for Backyard Bird Shop’s sponsorship spots.  They are beautiful, thanks to Steve’s artistry.

Steve is a local Portland treasure, an award-winning photographer and environmentalist.  Steve recently won first place in USA/North America, Swarovski Digiscoper of the Year contest for 2009, with a Pileated Woodpecker pond reflection shot, taken at the Finley Estate pond and bird sanctuary that he is developing.  You can visit Swarovski’s company & web sponsor, Bird Watcher’s Digest.com, to see the winning 3 places and a few more photographs (including a Western Bluebird of Steve’s) is at: http://www.bwd.digiscoperoftheyear.com/en_us/winners

This is by no means Steve’s first award!  You can see earlier examples of Steve’s award-winning digiscopes in the Sep/Oct 2009 issue of WildBird magazine.  In that issue, WildBird, a bimonthly magazine dedicated to birdwatching, features the contest winners of their 21st annual photography contest.  This year there were over 1,600 entries for five categories of awards.  In the digiscoping category Steve was honored to win not only the 3rd place award (again! he won it last year as well) but also 1st place!  Yes, two of the three places this year!  Steve’s two shots are on pages 30 and 31.  You can see a large screen image of his award shots in the “Contest Awards Gallery” of Steve’s website, with this year’s and last year’s winning shots: www.pbase.com/sberliner

Last year’s award-winning photograph of a Northern Harrier appeared in the September/October 2008 issue of WildBird.  The photo shows the raptor holding an American Coot and won third place in the digiscoping category of the birding magazine’s 20th annual photo contest. 

In November 2008 Steve was awarded 10th place in Swarovski’s annual “Digiscoper of the Year” competition, truly an international competition by the Austrian maker of cut glass crystal and precise optical equipment.  There were over 1,300 digiscoped photos entered. Only two winners were chosen from the United States.  While 15 of the 22 recognized photos were taken using Swarovski field scopes (and seven of the top 10), Steve won 10th place using his 1997 Kowa Japanese made scope.

Click here to Visit Steve Berliner’s website to see stunning photographs of local birds, as well as terrific images of other wildlife!