Call for entries: The Sony World Photography Awards

The Sony World Photography Awards celebrates its 11th anniversary of spotlighting and showcasing the best photography in the world from the past year.

Free to enter, and open to all photographers, the awards are an authoritative voice in the photographic industry, with the power to shape the careers of its winning, shortlisted, and commended photographers.

Plus, there’s a total prize pool of $30,000 USD, plus the latest Sony digital imaging equipment up for grabs across the awards’ four competitions.

• Professional (10 categories, judged on a body of work) Deadline: January 11, 2018
   
• Open (10 categories, rewarding the best single images)
   
• National Awards (entries submitted to the Open competition are automatically entered into the National Awards based on nationality) Deadline: January 4, 2018
   
• Youth (open to all photographers aged 12–19, a single image responding to one brief) Deadline: January 4, 2018
   
• Student Focus (for those studying photography) Deadline: December 4, 2017

In last year’s competition, Kiwi photographer Shannan Crow was named one of the world’s best, and awarded ‘highly commended’ within the Nature category for an image depicting the Milky Way rising above the main highway through the Southern Alps in the South Island.

Shot with the Sony A7R II paired with the Sony Vario-Tessar T FE 16–35mm f/4 ZA OSS Lens, Crow’s image, ‘Stars and Cars’, was taken at close to midnight in Porters Pass in rural Canterbury, and put together from a series of images in a multi-row panorama.

“I was mostly drawn to the small size and full-frame sensor on the A7R II,” Crow explains. “I like to carry as little as possible so that I’m more likely to walk further and explore more places. So the small size of the mirrorless system was ideal for that.”

The news came to Crow as both surprising and exciting. He says, “I entered the competition on a whim one morning before work, and then I completely forgot about it until I got an email from the organizers … I was pretty stoked when I saw that being commended meant it was one of the top 50 images.”

The competition has also named the first-, second- and third-place National Award winners as Miriam Strong, Linda Cutche, and Matt Lance Draper. Strong’s gold-winning image, ‘Triple Exposed’, was captured through analogue techniques — formed through three images that were exposed on the same piece of film.

“I took the first image of the backyard/houses then wound the film back, then I took a silhouette portrait of my friend and wound the film back. The final image was of some mint in a pot plant, which you can see in the girl’s face,” the photographer explains. She is a second-time winner of the New Zealand National award.