Donna Feledichuk: Award-Winning Canadian Wildlife Photographer

I am an award-winning Canadian wildlife photographer and conservation storyteller based in Alberta’s Boreal Forest. My work explores the character, resilience, and relationships of wild animals and has been recognized by leading international competitions and publications.

I have always believed there is a difference between looking at wildlife and really seeing it.

I love the exhilarating moments, the hunt, the chase, cubs playing, birds fighting in mid-air. I love photographing them too. But I am always drawn back to the moments between the moments.

The quiet ones. The vulnerable ones. The moments when an animal is simply being an animal and, for a fraction of a second, we are allowed into its world.

I want you to see the fox not simply as a beautiful subject, but perhaps as a mother watching over her kits. To see the bear not simply as an animal to photograph, but as belonging to that river, forest and landscape. To see relationships, survival, vulnerability and the ordinary moments of a wild life unfolding whether we are there to photograph it or not.

Beauty matters to me. Light matters. Composition matters. All of the things that can make a wildlife photograph extraordinary matter. But ultimately, I want those things to make you stop long enough to see the animal.

Because once we care about the life in the photograph, what happens to that life and the wild places it depends upon matters differently. Those are the photographs I keep searching for. Because I don't want someone to simply admire one of my photographs. I want them to stay long enough to care about the animal.

Perhaps that way of looking at the world has something to do with the path that brought me here.

Photography wasn't my first career. Education was. I spent many years as an educator before moving into post-secondary leadership, and that part of my life has shaped my photography far more than I probably realized at the time.

My journey with a camera began with travel and the desire to bring home something of the places I was fortunate enough to experience. Then life became busy. Work, raising a family, and all of the things that fill the years meant photography moved in and out of the foreground.

When I returned to it seriously, wildlife changed everything.

I live in northern Alberta, surrounded by the Boreal Forest. Wildlife isn't something I have to travel across the world to experience. It is part of the landscape around me. Foxes, great gray owls, moose, and countless other species live their lives here, often quietly and largely unnoticed.

The more time I spent with them, the less interested I became in simply photographing an animal. I wanted to make photographs that said something about the animal itself.

That pursuit has taken me from the Boreal Forest to some extraordinary wild places around the world, but what I am searching for hasn't really changed: a moment that makes me stop, a moment that asks me to look a little longer, a moment that allows us to really see.

It is also why conservation has become inseparable from my photography. There is an important place for photographs that document habitat loss, human-wildlife conflict and species in crisis. Those stories need to be told. But I also believe conservation begins much earlier.

It begins with caring.

And sometimes, before we can care about something, we first have to really see it.

That is what I am trying to do with my photography: give you long enough with an animal to recognize something beyond the species, its relationships, vulnerability, resilience, and the place where it belongs.

That belief extends beyond my own photography. I am a member of the Canadian Conservation Photographers Collective, working alongside other photographers who use imagery to support conservation awareness and action. I also write a conservation column for PhotoWILD Magazine, where I explore issues affecting wildlife and wild places and the stories behind them. Both give me opportunities to contribute to conservation beyond the photographs I make, using my work, my writing, and my voice to help people better understand the natural world and why protecting it matters.

Perhaps it isn't surprising that after spending so much of my life in education, teaching eventually became an important part of my photography as well. I don't believe great photography comes from simply being told which settings to use or standing where someone else tells you to stand.

I have always been interested in the why behind things. In photography, that means going beyond settings and technique to understand why the light worked, why a background changed the photograph, why we stayed when others put their cameras down, or why one frame makes us feel something while another technically excellent photograph leaves us unmoved.

Working with other photographers, whether in the field or through mentorship, has given me another way to explore those questions. I enjoy seeing how differently people experience the same scene and helping photographers become more deliberate about what they see and what they want to say with their own work. In many ways, teaching photography has made me think more deeply about my own photography too.

Over the years, my work has been recognized internationally through competitions and publications including Nature's Best Photography, Canadian Geographic, BBC Wildlife, National Geographic España, the World Nature Photography Awards and Travel Photographer of the Year, just to name a few.

For me, the real value of that recognition is the audience it gives the wildlife in my photographs. A photograph seen by thousands, or sometimes millions, of people becomes another opportunity to ask them to stop and look a little longer. To move beyond simply recognizing a moose, coyote, owl, or fox and really see the animal in front of them, its character, its relationships, its vulnerability, its place in the world.

I don't believe wildlife has to be rare, exotic, or in crisis for its story to matter. Some of the moments I value most are remarkably ordinary: a mother watching over her young, an animal resting in the landscape it calls home, a quiet interaction that might last only seconds. Photography gives me the opportunity to make those ordinary moments extraordinary enough that someone stops to notice.

That is what I hope happens when one of my photographs reaches a wider audience. Not simply that more people see the photograph, but that more people really see the wildlife within it.

Because that has always been the reason I keep coming back to those moments between the moments.

Photography has given me extraordinary experiences, taken me to remarkable places and introduced me to people who have become much more than clients. But whether I am lying in the grass with a fox family, watching a bear disappear into the landscape, or helping another photographer find what they are searching for in their own work, it always comes back to the same thing.

Pay attention. Look longer. Really see.

Because when we really see an animal, a moment, or what another person is trying to create, we begin to understand it differently.

And perhaps that is where caring begins.