2026 Winners Gallery

2026 Open Photographer Of The Year

Winner Open Aerial

Daniel Viñé Garcia, Spain

Daniel Viñé is a landscape and aerial photographer based in Spain. For more than fifteen years, photography has been his way of exploring the world, driven by a fascination with extraordinary landscapes, remote places, and fleeting light capable of completely transforming a scene. Although he first began taking photographs in 2005, his journeys to Iceland and the western United States in 2015 marked a turning point. Since then, travel and photography have become inseparable: photography no longer simply accompanies the journey — very often, it determines where the next one will take him.

This search has taken him to places as diverse as Namibia, the Moroccan desert, the Canadian Rockies, the American Southwest, and some of South America’s most extreme landscapes, from the Bolivian Altiplano to the Argentine Puna and northern Chile. Vietnam and Turkey have also inspired another side of his work: a fascination with people, their traditions, and ways of life closely connected to the land.

Panoramic photography has always been central to his visual approach, first with a camera and later from the air. The drone expanded this even further: moving only a few metres can completely transform a landscape, revealing entirely new compositions.

His work has received international recognition in competitions including the International Aerial Photographer of the Year, World Photographic Cup, Milky Way Photographer of the Year, Drone Photo Awards, Memorial María Luisa, and DJI SkyPixel Photo Contest, among others.

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The Sleeping Giant, Parinacota, Chile

Parinacota Volcano was one of the main photographic goals of my trip to Chile. Rising to more than 6,300 metres, its distinctive snow-covered cone has an almost perfect symmetry that immediately reminded me of volcanoes such as Mount Fuji. Beside it stands Pomerape, another giant reaching more than 6,200 metres, together forming one of the most impressive landscapes I encountered during the journey.

After allowing time for proper acclimatisation, I spent three days and three nights at around 4,500 metres above sea level, giving myself the best possible chance of photographing the area under ideal conditions.

This image was captured during the final moments of sunset. After one last burst of light, the landscape gradually took on magenta tones, wrapping the volcanoes and the high-altitude lakes in a particularly special atmosphere.

The original capture was a 360-degree aerial panorama made from 33 individual exposures. I later refined the framing from the full panorama to concentrate the final composition on the volcanoes, the light, and the shapes of the landscape.

Cathedral of Starlight, El Peñón, Argentina

After several days travelling along dirt roads through the Argentine Puna, we reached this remote part of the Andean Altiplano: a vast landscape of white pumice formations sculpted by the wind. The area is so immense, uniform and isolated that it is surprisingly easy to lose your sense of direction while exploring it.

While walking through the area, I found this particular spot, where the pumice formations and pale ground perfectly reflected the almost surreal character of the landscape. As I worked on the composition, I also noticed a shape in the terrain that reminded me of a large prehistoric bird, adding even more to the otherworldly feeling of the scene.

At around 3,100 metres above sea level, beneath a sky almost completely free from light pollution, the night sky was spectacular. I waited until late into the night, when the Galactic Centre had climbed higher above the horizon and the Milky Way formed a huge arc across the landscape.

When we finally started driving back to our accommodation in El Peñón, we came across the police: they were looking for us. The owner of our accommodation had become worried when we had not returned and thought we might have got lost or become stuck somewhere with the 4×4. We had told her we would be back late… although I suppose she had not imagined quite how late.

My Perfect Night, Antofalla, Argentina

During our expedition through the Argentine Puna, after several days travelling deeper into this remote part of the Andean Altiplano, we reached a salt flat in the province of Catamarca, more than 3,300 metres above sea level. Its small, colourful pools broke up the vast white expanse and gave the landscape an almost otherworldly appearance.

The nearest settlement, Antofalla, is a tiny community of only a few dozen people, located several hours from any other populated area. Electricity is supplied by a generator that is switched off during the night, leaving this part of the Puna in almost complete darkness.

The southern sky offered a particularly striking composition: at one end of the Milky Way arc was the bright Galactic Centre, while at the opposite end stretched the enormous Gum Nebula, one of the great structures of the southern sky. It is a view of the Milky Way very different from the one we are used to seeing from the Northern Hemisphere.

The Emerald Arch Over Lofoten, Norway

This photograph came to life as the Northern Lights flared up and curved perfectly around the mountain. The display was so vastly immense that even my 12mm ultra-wide lens couldn’t capture the entire scene in a single frame. My only choice was to shoot a panorama. It wasn’t until I stitched the frames together that I realized the aurora had formed a flawless, complete arch framing the peak. Standing on the wet beach, the calm shore provided a mirror-like reflection of the entire celestial phenomenon.

The conditions that night were brutal—freezing cold, biting winds, and I had to wade into the icy seawater to get the shot. Given all the challenges faced in those harsh elements, bringing this vision to reality is something I am truly proud of.

Wutimet Bunyasirisith is a Bangkok-based landscape, fine art, and travel photographer, as well as a digital content creator behind the travel brand Lazy Coup. With a passion for capturing the raw beauty of nature and distant horizons, he specializes in high-resolution panoramic and aerial photography. His work aims to convey the scale, drama, and quiet poetry of the natural world, taking viewers on visual journeys across stunning global landscapes.

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Hattori Tai, Regional Director of Commercial and Industrial Inkjet Products, Epson Southeast Asia said: “We are thrilled to celebrate the exceptional talent emerging from Southeast Asia for the third year running. Wutimet’s success reflects a continuing trend of Southeast Asian photographers venturing to distant global landscapes to capture back awe-inspiring, world-class panoramic visuals. His work has shown us relentless passion, vision and technical discipline that define our region’s creative community. Epson is honoured to support our region’s best visual storytellers with world-class print solutions that preserve the depth, scale and rich colour of their photography.”

 

Southern white rhinos are, in their normal state, are surprisingly unthreatening – calm grazers who move around at a leisurely pace. One morning at Solio Game Reserve in Kenya we were photographing a group of 8 rhinos with a few cattle egrets walking among them, a rare sighting in most other national parks. Something suddenly shifted and five of the rhinos broke into a run. We understood in that instant why a group of rhinos is called a crash. Neither of us has ever played rugby, but from the point of view of the egrets this is how we imagine a forward pack must look, heads down and all that weight already committed. Thankfully the egrets took to the air and got out of the way with barely a moment to spare. Seeing these many rhinos together is already rare and seeing them run together at another species is rarer still. At Solio Game Reserve, where Kenya’s rhino population has been painstakingly rebuilt without any de-horning even an accidental moment of chaos feels like a miracle.

Preeti and Prashant are an Indian wildlife photographer couple based in Dubai. They work together as @composingthewild. They view the natural world as a canvas for emotion, narrative and art, not just as a subject to be documented. Their work moves beyond the conventional bounds of wildlife photography, focusing not on species checklists or iconic sightings, but on moments – fleeting, unstaged, and alive with meaning. They seek the timeless and the evocative, often using monochrome tones to strip away distraction to reveal the essence of a moment. It is their ambition that their work will help to restore the connection between nature and humans.

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The Epson Digital Art Prize is decided by the executive team at Epson Australia from the top 50 entries in each category of the Open competition. The entries must show excellence in digital post processing as well as exceptional photographic technique

Epson Australia MD, Craig Heckenberg, said,

Photographers at every level, from first-time entrants to established professionals, use the Pano Awards as a benchmark for their own work. The aerial category is a perfect example of why the competition has stayed relevant for 17 years. It responds to what photographers are actually doing and it gives the global industry a view of where the craft is heading next.