We’ve featured the International Photography Awards on Bored Panda before, but coming back to this competition always feels like opening a door into a hundred different worlds at once. One minute you’re staring at a quiet, intimate portrait that looks like it belongs in a movie, the next you’re hit with a split-second wildlife moment that’s so perfectly timed it feels impossible. And that’s kind of IPA’s charm; the pure variety of submissions and winners.
With photographers entering from around the globe across professional, non-professional, and student divisions, the range is enormous. You’ll see big, dramatic scenes with cinematic lighting, tiny details that turn the everyday into something surreal, and documentary frames that carry a whole story in a single glance.
So we’re presenting the standout images that placed in the top three among their categories. These are the ones we couldn’t stop thinking about after the first scroll. Take your time with them and tell us which ones are your favorites. And if you want to check out all of what the IPA has to offer, you can do so on their website and Instagram page.
More info: Instagram | photoawards.com
#1 “The Guardian” By Katarzyna Okrzesik-Mikolajek
3rd Place / Nature/Domestic Animals.
Description: “Arabian horses photographed in one of the caves in Cappadocia, Turkey.”
36points
#2 “A Place Called Home” By Fenqiang Liu
2nd Place / Nature/Sunrise / Sunset.
Description: “It was early November, a year and a half ago, and I was canoeing through a quiet Louisiana swamp just after sunrise. Soft morning light filtered through the trees, creating a peaceful yet otherworldly atmosphere. A Great Egret glided gracefully across the water, catching my attention and drawing my lens to the richness of the swamp—a warm, thriving place that many creatures call home.”
34points
#3 “Unbridled” By Aga Karmol
1st Place / Nature/Domestic Animals.
Description: “Andalusian stallion at liberty, expressing his temperament and character in his powerful movements.”
29points
#4 “50/50” By Abstract Aerial Art
1st Place / Nature/Aerial / Drone.
25points
#5 “Another World” By Wayne Sorensen
2nd Place / Nature/Aerial / Drone. Description: “The soda lakes of Kenya are like a beautiful, but bizarre, science experiment. With a high concentration of sodium at the lake bed, the combination of hot springs and minerals creates a myriad of colors and textures. It’s truly Mother Nature’s artistry at its finest. And if that’s not enough, the lakes are home to many thousands of flamingos that feed on the algae. Flying at high altitude in a helicopter, I was able to capture this incredible series of images. The images show an otherworldly landscape, both in isolation from all signs of life and with the flamingos in their natural habitat.”
24points
#6 “The Soul Of Namibia” By Jeet Khagram
1st Place / Nature/Landscape. Description: “Namibia challenged my eye and spirit. In Sossusvlei, I watched light dance on endless dunes and shadows stretch like stories across sand. Deadvlei felt frozen in time, its trees standing like ghosts of the past. Swakopmund offered contrast where ocean mist met desert silence. Behind the lens, I wasn’t just capturing landscapes. I was chasing emotion, scale, and the feeling of being small in a place so vast and untouched it felt like another world.”
23points
#7 “Ancient Landscape” By Hiroki Matsubara
1st Place / Fine Art/Landscape.
Description: “This is a view of Mount Bromo taken in Indonesia. I snapped the shutter at the moment it erupted from the active volcano. The sky and the earth are tinted pink by the morning glow, and the ground is filled with a sea of clouds.”
23points
#8 “Corkscrew” By Cain Shimizu
1st Place / Event/Other.
Description: “We are fascinated by the flawless performances of the Japanese aerobatic flying team, who always perform tricks that are far more dangerous than we could ever imagine.”
23points
#9 “Masters Of The Air” By Christiaan Van Heijst
1st Place / Special/Night Photography
“A transcontinental giant meets a celestial body — a Boeing 747 framed in silhouette as it cuts across the face of the moon. This monochrome image captures a fleeting alignment of engineering and eternity, highlighting the poetry of flight against the vast stillness of space.”
21points
#10 “Echoes Of Waste” By Lakshitha Karunarathna
1st Place / Nature/Environmental / Editorial.
Description: “A lone Sri Lankan elephant forages through a vibrant but toxic landfill in Ampara. Sri Lanka harbors nearly 10% of the global Asian elephant population, yet poor waste management has turned garbage into a deadly lure. As habitats shrink, elephants increasingly scavenge open dumps, developing dangerous addictions to waste. Many suffer from microplastic and polythene indigestion, leading to internal injuries, starvation, and death. This escalating crisis demands urgent reforms in waste disposal and conflict mitigation to ensure coexistence.”
21points
#11 “Legend1” By Abolghasem Khoshro
3rd Place / Fine Art/Minimal / Minimalism.
Description: “Legend, a purebred German horse kept at Mr. Vasal's farm in the suburbs of Alborz province, 70 Km to Tehran, Iran.”
21points
#12 “Phare Du Petit Minou” By Deryk Baumgaertner
3rd Place / Architecture/Aerial / Drone. Description: “Phare du Petit Minou is the name of a lighthouse built in 1848 west of the city of Brest in the Finistère department in Brittany. The picture was taken at blue hour, when suddenly the fog and the onset of rain dramatically intensified the mood. The light from the lighthouse reflected in the fog bank, creating a magical and eerie lighting situation. Despite concerns about the rain, that was reason enough to let the drone fly up briefly and capture the mood on the sensor.”
21points
#13 “Lonely Tree, Lencois Maranhenses” By Ignacio Palacios
3rd Place / Nature/Landscape.
Description: “Lencois Maranhenses, Brazil.”
19points
#14 “Future Death” By Daniel Flormann
2nd Place / Nature/Environmental / Editorial Description: “Captured in October 2024 in Indonesia, this image shows a local fisherman’s net where three small sharks were caught as bycatch. Attracted by anchovies, the main catch, a whale shark already injured (most probably by a boat propeller), approached but avoided contact. With 100 million sharks killed annually, mostly for fins or bycatch, this whale shark faces its own grim future—brutally killed for human luxury, ignoring the catastrophic impact on our oceans and the survival of humanity.”
19points
#15 “River Bound For Breakfast” By Michael Mihaljevich
3rd Place / Nature/Sunrise / Sunset.
Description: “Among the wilderness, traces of the pure West remain. They unfold in rare living scenes unspoiled by man's influence. Cued by the rising sun, this bull moose relocated to feeding ground under the canopy of river bank cottonwoods in the heart of his majestic homeland.”
18points
#16 “Walk On Water” By Joyce Helms-Harkema
2nd Place / Nature/Domestic Animals.
Description: “Bushra the Saluki is walking on water at the beach in the Netherlands.”
18points
#17 “Amidst The Rubble Of Disaster” By Mehrdad Oskouei
1st Place / Analog / Film/Photojournalism.
Description: “Earthquake in a village near the city of Qazvin in Iran. A boy searches in confusion for other family members and his belongings and school supplies hours after his house was destroyed.”
18points
#18 “Jump Into The Night” By Tom Weller
1st Place / Sports/Winter sports, 1st Place / Editorial / Press/Sports.
Description: “Antti Aalto from Finland in action during his jump at the individual HS137 qualification of the men's Four Hills Tournament in Oberstdorf on 28 December 2024.”
17points
#19 “Where The Plastic Goes” By Edu Ponces
2nd Place / Editorial / Press/Environmental.
Description: “Plastic pollution is a global issue, but Southeast Asia is the most affected region in the world for three reasons: poor waste management by many governments, ocean currents that draw trash to its shores, and the importation of waste from wealthy countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and the European Union. This work represents two years of exploring some areas most impacted by plastic pollution. The plastic waste crisis is growing like a wave, with increasingly severe effects on the health of our planet and humanity.”
17points
#20 “Resistance” By Meaghan Paul
3rd Place / Special/Night Photography.
Description: “In response to my art, a woman once challenged me saying, "Lol, who would have thought photography would be political?" Indeed, I believe art by its very nature is political. It must be political. We live in dangerous times. We must use whatever voice is ours to use. Our silence is a complicity. The handmaid, once a character of fiction, now walks the streets in protests. In this image, the silent figure under the electric eye is not a figure of submission, but defiance. The handmaid's costume is no longer a costume. It is a uniform of protest, a scarlet flare against institutional darkness.”
16points