Success in National Landscape Photography Awards 2025

My success in Czech Nature Photo in 2025 motivated me to and enter another competition that year, this time focused purely on landscapes. I had been aware of the Natural Landscape Photography Awards for several years. It’s an international competition dedicated to realistic landscape photography, which is exactly the kind of work I’m most drawn to creating.

The “realistic” means that the integrity of the photographed scene should be preserved and the image shouldn’t rely on heavy post-processing, i.e. no warping, no artificially enlarging mountains, no composites. The shortlisted images are also subject to RAW file checks, which is far from standard in many competitions. On top of that, the awards are organized by photographers I’ve been following for years, whose work I admire and who have built a strong community around a similar approach to landscape photography.

So I spent quite a bit of time selecting which images to submit. Knowing how strong the competition is, I didn’t expect much, though I’ll admit I quietly hoped for at least one recognized photo. The results really caught me off guard. Ptarmigan in the Whiteout became a runner-up in one of the three main categories, Intimate Landscapes. My image from the Krkonoše Mountains, Snow Pit, won the special category Frozen Worlds, and in the Photographer of the Year ranking, which was based on an overall portfolio, I finished fifth. From more than 1,100 photographers and 11,000 submitted images, that honestly feels hard to believe.

A very nice part of the whole experience was the online meeting with the awarded photographers. Everyone briefly introduced their image and shared the story behind it. It was great to hear about the conditions and locations where the photos were made, and what motivated people to take them. On a personal level, it was also quite special to suddenly be part of a group of people whose work I had mostly known only from my social media feed.

The final cherry on top is the beautiful book featuring the awarded and selected images, published a few months later. The print quality is outstanding, and it’s exactly the kind of book you enjoy leafing through slowly with a cup of coffee. If you’re looking for a bit of weekend inspiration for your bookshelf, you can order it directly from the competition’s website.