From molten volcanoes to star-filled skies, the Epson International Pano Awards 2025 presents a breathtaking tribute to the world's natural beauty. Through their wide-angle lenses, photographers from around the globe reveal Earth in its most expansive, authentic, and sometimes almost surreal form. This 16th edition, dedicated to panoramic photography, celebrates the patience and precision of those who know how to transform a simple horizon into visual vertigo.
The competition showcases extraordinary landscapes spanning from the mountains of Iceland to the forests of Vietnam, with each image serving as a suspended fragment and an invitation to rediscover the scale of our world. The awards demonstrate how photography serves as a dialogue between nature and the human eye, blending geometric precision with poetic inspiration.
Among the standout winners, Daniel Viñé Garcia captured Iceland's Fagradalsfjall volcano eruption as a creature of fire in his piece "Smoking Skull," while Yuan Li transformed the Norwegian port of Svolvær into a nocturnal stained glass window in "Svolvær By Night." These panoramas showcase how light can become architecture, with some photographers seeing landscapes while others perceive drawings of light.
The winning photographs read like living paintings, featuring rice paddies from Vietnam to Namibian forests. Each shot seems to breathe with successive nuances of ochre, mist, and green that flow like impressionist brushstrokes. Notable works include Lukas Moesch's "Entstehung" from Iceland, Stefan Liebermann's "Lofoten Sunrise" from Norway, and Florian Kriechbaumer's "Tea Hills" from Vietnam.
The collection spans diverse categories including Open Nature/Landscape, Amateur Nature/Landscape, Open Built Environment/Architecture, and Open Southeast Asia. Winners captured stunning scenes from locations including Algeria with Alex Wides' "Last Fireworks," Mexico with Daniel Vaughan's "Descend," Tonga with Matthew Smith's "The Whales Welcome," and Namibia with Egor Goryachev's "Quiver Tree Under The Red Flame Of Orion."
Other remarkable entries include Phuc Minh Le's "Golden Season In Trung Khanh" from Vietnam, Judith Kuhn's "Cinderella's Castle" from Germany, and Ranjan Ramchandani's "At The Bar" from Tanzania. The competition also featured works from Kenya, Bolivia, France, the United States, Slovenia, and Italy, demonstrating the global reach of panoramic photography excellence.
Beyond technical prowess, these photographs tell a simple yet profound story: beauty takes time. In a world saturated with instant images, these panoramas reaffirm the value of patient observation – the kind that contemplates before capturing. Here, the world is not consumed but contemplated, and perhaps that's where all the magic of photography truly resides.
The 20 winning images compose a planetary fresco that is both intimate and infinite. Behind each capture, viewers can sense the waiting, the race against light, and the silence before the shutter click. These panoramic works serve as a reminder that in our fast-paced digital age, there remains immense value in taking the time to truly see and appreciate the world's natural wonders through the patient eye of dedicated photographers.
