The winners of the International Landscape Photographer of the Year
The seventh International Landscape Photographer of the Year competition has announced its winners for 2020.
The annual Award has a prize pool of $10,000USD and two main prizes; The Photograph of the Year is awarded to the best single landscape photograph, while to be named International Landscape Photographer of the Year requires a set of four images.
The latter is the main prize, acknowledging the additional skill and artistry required to produce a portfolio of landscape photographs.
More than 3,800 entries were received in the competition, with the overall winner (based on a folio submission of at least four images), Kelvin Yuen from Hong Kong, who, remarkably, says he spent four years focusing on the competition and studying previous winners before entering.
“I’m 24 years old and I’ve been taking photos for six years since borrowing my cousin's camera for a hiking day trip to Lion Rock Peak," he says.
"A person like me, who grew up in a city (Hong Kong), this walk opened a whole new world to me. Since then, I have spent most of my free time in the mountains, exploring the spectacular views of nature."
Kelvin uses a Canon EOS 5D Mark IV camera for his landscape photography, along with a Laowa 12mm f2.8 lens and Sigma 14mm f1.8 for night photography, plus Tamron 15-30mm f2.8, Tamron 24-70mm f2.8 and Tamron 70-200mm f4 zoom lenses. Kelvin uses H&Y neutral density filters (ND 8/64/1000).
He says that over the years, he has developed a personal post-production workflow for colour control and atmosphere creation.
“I use Adobe Camera Raw to adjust the main aspects of my file, such as tone and colour. Then after this rough adjustment, I drag the photo into Adobe Photoshop to manage the details. I always use dodging and burning to highlight the foreground or the main subject, to enhance the attraction of what I want to present in the photo. Also, vertical panoramas are one of my favourite techniques, as some perspectives cannot be captured with a single shot”.
The winner of the Photograph of the Year (awarded for a single image) is Kai Hornung from Germany, with his image Life Stream.
A number of special awards were also awarded this year, which change each year, with Australian photographer Grant Galbraith taking out the Dark & Moody award. You can see all the special award winners below.
You can see all the winners, including the top 101 finalists which are published in the International Landscape Photographer of the Year book, here.