Fritz Pölking was born in 1936 and grew up photographing the songbirds that nested around his family home in Krefeld, Germany.

'I saw a starling that came to get the ripe cherries under the tree in the garden and I thought to myself, "You have to take a picture of this, that looks really wonderful, a green lawn and a black bird with red berries in its beak." So I took a picture of it. After that I saw a peewit and I wanted to take pictures of it too. And that was how it all started.'

After initially specialising in European wildlife and producing a remarkable collection of pictures of the osprey, Polking began to travel extensively. He has now amassed a huge library of images from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Antarctica.He is known as a methodical and patient photographer who will return to a story over many years to ensure that he tells the full story. One of his projects, for example, saw him document the entire life of a single leopard called 'Paradise' and he's still photographing her children and grandchildren several years later.

He's just as enthusiastic about wildlife photography as he was in his youth, and is excited about the today's technology.

'The quality of the lenses, the use of autofocus, cameras that can take six to eight pictures a second, film materials such as Fujifilm's Sensia 100 and Velvia 50 - these are all fantastic tools that have improved the level of wildlife photography with incredible speed in the last few years. You only have to look at the ten years of books that document the results of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competitions to realise that the pictures have become more interesting and appealing each year.'