This video tutorial was recorded as a resource for photographers entering the Tara/White-fronted Tern Photography competition being run by the Northern New Zealand Seabird Trust. This competition is free to enter for BirdsNZ members and open to all photographers for a nominal fee, all of which goes to support Tara research.

While this photography competition has some some great prizes, including binoculars donated by Nikon New Zealand and copies of Peter Harrison’s Seabirds – the new identification guide, the primary aim is as a citizen science project, with the support of BirdsNZ, to gather research data including the diet species of birds during the 2022-23 breeding season. As such it a great opportunity for photographers to directly contribute toward research and expanding our knowledge of these birds and hopefully will be a springboard to ongoing data gathering.

To maximise the value of the project accurate and comprehensive data is important and imbedding as much data into the metadata of the images is extremely useful.