World Press Photo has announced its 2025 Photo of the Year, along with two finalists, highlighting some of the most impactful photojournalism of the past year. 3,778 photographers submitted 59,320 photographs, and DPReview recently covered the category winners. This year’s top honor, revealed last night, was bestowed upon Samar Abu Elouf, a Palestinian photojournalist based in Doha, for The New York Times.

Her winning image is a portrait of Mahmoud Ajjour, a young boy wounded while fleeing an Israeli airstrike in Gaza in March 2024. The boy had turned his back to urge his family to move faster when an explosion tore through the street, severing one of his arms and damaging the other. It’s a stark depiction of the toll ongoing violence has taken on the denizens of the region.

Elouf was evacuated from Gaza in late 2023. She shares an apartment complex with Ajjor, the double amputee subject of her image. In recent months, she has continued to document the lives of a small number of severely-wounded Gazans who, like Mahmoud, were able to leave for medical treatment.

Mahmoud Ajjor has a modest goal: to receive prosthetic limbs and live like other children. By the end of 2024, the United Nations estimated that Gaza had the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world. Copyright: © Samar Abu Elouf, for The New York Times

Two other finalists were selected as runners-up: John Moore for Night Crossing, depicting Chinese migrants warming themselves at the US-Mexico border at night. Musuk Nolte was also recognized for Droughts in the Amazon, capturing a young man bringing food to his mother in the drought-ridden village of Manacapuru.

Moore’s image of Chinese migrants warming themselves after a rainstorm, at the US-Mexico border, captures a moment of vulnerability that contrasts with how migration is depicted in mainstream talking points. Copyright: © John Moore, United States, Getty Images

“I remain endlessly grateful for the photographers who, despite the personal risks and emotional costs, record these stories to give all of us the opportunity to understand, empathise, and be inspired to action,” said Joumana El Zein Khoury, World Press Photo’s Executive Director.

A young man carries food to his mother in Manacapuru, a village in the Amazon that was once accessible by boat. Now, the river has dried up due to drought, and he walks several kilometers across the cracked riverbed. A harsh reality: the world’s largest rainforest increasingly resembles a desert. Copyright: © Musuk Nolte, Peru/Mexico, Panos Pictures, Bertha Foundation

The awarded stories will be shown to millions as part of the World Press Photo annual traveling exhibition in over 60 locations worldwide. These locations include the premiere in Amsterdam and then move on to other significant metropolises, including London, Rome, Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest. More information about the images and photographers can be found on the World Press Photo site.

Source link

Canon’s EOS R1 is the company’s first ‘1 series’ flagship camera to be mirrorless and is specifically aimed at sports and action photographers. Given its narrow focus, we wanted to test it out at a professional sports game – preferably one supported by its Action Priority autofocus mode, which Canon says will recognize when players are performing a specific action and automatically focus on them.

Thankfully, we were able to get a media pass to photograph a Spokane Velocity FC game, which was the perfect opportunity to put the EOS R1 to the test. A caveat before we start: I am by no means a professional sports photographer, nor am I a football expert. However, part of the pitch for Action Priority autofocus is that it’s able to react to what’s happening in the game automatically, which made this an especially interesting test of its abilities, even though most people looking likely to buy an R1 are fully capable of shooting a game without it.

So how’d it do? Quite well, I found. It made shooting feel natural; I would move the camera along with the action, and most of the time, it just handled subject selection, making sure the player in control of the ball was the one in focus. However, it clearly wasn’t a magical replacement for talent, either. There were a few times it decided to track a player who wasn’t involved in the action, though it was relatively easy to correct it by manually putting the AF tracking point over the player.

RF 70-200mm F2.8 L IS USM Z | 200mm | F2.8 | 1/1000 sec | ISO 1600 Photo: Mitchell Clark

Despite its occasional missteps, upon reviewing my shots, I found that Action Priority mode got me far better results than the combination of my football-tracking skills and standard subject recognition did. The EOS R1 was very tenacious at tracking people and excelled at keeping them in focus – which is great if you have the skill and knowledge necessary to know who to track and when to start tracking someone else.

I actually got the chance to talk to someone with those skills. One of the professional photographers at the game asked what I was shooting with, then said they also use an EOS R1; previously, they’d used an EOS R3. When I asked what they thought of the Action Priority mode, they said they didn’t think it made much of a difference. Given that they’d essentially trained themselves to do what it does, it’s not surprising that they didn’t find it as useful as I – someone without that training – did. However, they did find the EOS R1’s standard subject detection to be stickier than the EOS R3’s, especially when players were passing in front of and behind each other.

They were very fond of the camera’s Eye Control autofocus, where the camera automatically places the focus point on whatever you’re looking at. Despite having calibrated it a few times, I couldn’t get it to work reliably enough for me to be an asset rather than a liability. I tried it for a little bit at the game but ended up turning it off. However, it’s easy to see how it could improve the shooting experience if it does work for you – rather than relying on the camera to figure out what player is important, you can just follow the action with your eye.

Getting back to Action Priority mode, I did bump up against a few limitations with the system. It’s only available when using the electronic shutter and can’t be used with the EOS R1’s anti-flicker feature. While the camera’s readout is jaw-droppingly quick – I didn’t notice any rolling shutter artifacts on soccer balls in mid-flight – you will still see banding on electronic screens and under some LED lights.

You can eliminate banding by switching to the mechanical shutter, but doing so means giving up some of the EOS R1’s features and capabilities. Electronic shutter | RF 70-200mm F2.8 L IS USM Z | 200mm | F2.8 | 1/1000 sec | Edited to taste in ACR Photo: Mitchell Clark

The former was definitely an issue at the Spokane One stadium, and I found myself having to choose between giving myself a better chance of capturing the game with Action Priority and not having some quite distracting artifacts in the background. With that said the mechanical shutter on the EOS R1 can only shoot at 12fps instead of 40, which helped make the decision a bit easier.

I also found myself wishing that the pre-burst capture feature was configurable. The amount it buffers is based on your shooting speed: Canon’s manual says that in the 40 shots per second mode, it’ll buffer around half a second, but there’s no setting to control for how long or how many shots you’d like it to buffer.

Because my shooting style involves starting focus tracking with a half-press of the shutter button well before actually taking the photo, I wound up filling almost a third of my storage in the first half-hour of the game since every shot I took saved the 20 shots before it. Rather than trying to get myself used to back-button focusing, which doesn’t start pre-capture*, in the middle of the game, I just turned it off, but I feel like I could’ve gotten a few more good shots if I could’ve used the pre-burst capture, but set to only save five or ten photos from before the shutter press.

* And, in fact, cannot be set to start pre-capture, something that irked the pro I talked to.

It took me a while to get a header shot, which I strongly suspect would’ve been easier with pre-capture. RF 70-200mm F2.8 L IS USM Z + RF 1.4x Teleconvertor 150mm | F4 | 1/100 | ISO 320 Photo: Mitchell Clark

Also, Canon, while I have your attention, why can’t I set one of my custom buttons to turn pre-burst capture on and off? To get around this, I followed Brian Worley’s trick of setting up a custom mode that’s exactly the same as my manual shooting mode, except with pre-capture off, but even that’s a bad solution. For one, there’s only one button you can assign to switch between modes, but also, if I made any changes while I was shooting pre-capture, those wouldn’t be carried over when I switched modes to turn it off.

While I’ve picked a lot of nits here, there were, unsurprisingly, a lot of things the EOS R1 did right. Its buffer felt endless – during the game, the camera only ever stopped shooting when I took my finger off the shutter, and never because it had to stop and write the photos to the card. At home, I let it run at 40fps for around 20 seconds and still didn’t reach the bottom of the buffer.

The battery had a similar amount of stamina. Over the course of the 90-ish minute game I shot mostly using the viewfinder and took around 9000 photos. (If you’re not confident that you can capture the decisive moment, you might as well capture every moment.) At the end of the day, I still had three out of four bars of battery and would’ve felt quite comfortable shooting for another 90 minutes. I couldn’t have, of course, but the camera could.

That’s probably the moral of the story. It’s no shock that using the EOS R1 didn’t immediately make me a pro sports photographer. Action Priority mode did, however, let me capture moments that only pro sports photographers could’ve not so long ago, and I suspect that Eye Control could’ve done the same if I could get it to work reliably for me.

It’s easy to imagine that sort of thing being really exciting as it makes its way into more accessible models – there’s always been something of a Catch-22 where entry-level cameras aimed at beginners come with the autofocus systems that offer the least assistance. Something like Action Priority mode or Eye Control could help parents capture their children’s sporting achievements without requiring them to become pro photographers or buy high-end cameras that cost thousands of dollars.

RF 70-200mm F2.8 L IS USM Z | 200mm | F4 | 1/1000 | ISO 1250 Photo: Mitchell Clark

That future may be a ways off, though, and it doesn’t really help tell the story of the EOS R1, a camera almost exclusively for pros. That’s not to say that they won’t use those features, just that they’ll have different considerations when doing so; is Action Priority worth narrowing your shooting options and giving up some manual control so you can fully focus on composition and understanding the state of play, and can you rely on Eye Control when everything’s on the line?

Realistically, I’m not the person to answer those questions. However, it’s interesting that Canon added so many features designed to make a camera that’ll likely only ever be used by professionals easier to use. It’s like getting into an F1 car and discovering that, alongside all the manual controls, it actually has a quite capable self-driving system. The surprising part isn’t that the EOS R1 was up to the task of shooting the game – it’s essentially designed from the ground up to do that – but I wasn’t expecting it to also help me out so much along the way.

Source link

Sony World Photography Awards Overall Winners

Sony’s World Photography Awards celebrated the 18th edition of its Overall Winners competition with a gala ceremony in London. Ten professional category winners received recognition for their work across multiple genres, including architecture, wildlife, portraiture, and landscape. Each winner participated in Insights, a day of industry talks, and received Sony digital imaging equipment as a prize.

British photographer Zed Nelson was named Photographer of the Year for The Anthropocene Illusion, a six-years-in-the-making documentary project examining how humans shape and simulate nature in an increasingly artificial world. He will have the opportunity to present an additional body of work at next year’s Sony World Photography Awards 2026 exhibition.

Olivier Unia was awarded Open Photographer of the Year for his image of a traditional Moroccan equestrian performance. Micaela Vidivia Medina was awarded Student Photographer of the Year for her series about incarcerated women in Chile’s prisons. Daniel Dian-Ji Wu won Youth Photographer of the Year for a skateboarding silhouette shot at sunset in Venice Beach, California.

Acclaimed documentary photographer Susan Meiselas was honored with the Outstanding Contribution to Photography award. Sixty of her images will be featured with more than 300 total prints, including the competition’s second and third-place finalists from the World Photography Awards, at Somerset House in London from April 17th to May 5th. You can see all of the winning images on the contest website, worldphoto.org.

Photographer of the Year

Photographer: Zed Nelson

Series title: The Anthropocene Illusion

Description: In a tiny fraction of Earth’s history, humans have altered the world beyond anything it has experienced in tens of millions of years. Scientists are calling it a new epoch: The Anthropocene – the age of human. Future geologists will find evidence in the rock strata of an unprecedented human impact on our planet, from huge concentrations of plastics to the fallout from the burning of fossil fuels, and vast deposits of concrete used to build our cities.

We are forcing animals and plants to extinction by removing their habitats, and divorcing ourselves from the land we once roamed. Yet we cannot face the true scale of our loss. Somewhere within us the desire for contact with nature remains. ‘So, while we devastate the world around us, we have become masters of a stage-managed, artificial ‘experience’ of nature – a reassuring spectacle, an illusion.’

Over six years, and across four continents, Zed Nelson has explored how we immerse ourselves in increasingly choreographed and simulated environments to mask our destructive impact on the natural world.

Camera & equipment: Hasselblad X1D, D810, Mamiya RZ67, D850

Copyright: © Zed Nelson, United Kingdom, Photographer of the Year, Professional competition, Wildlife & Nature, Sony World Photography Awards 2025

Open Photographer of the Year: Motion Category

Photographer: Olivier Unia

Series title: Tbourida La Chute

Description: Many of the photographs taken during a traditional Moroccan ‘tbourida’ show the riders firing their rifles. With this image, the photographer wanted to share another side of the event, and show how dangerous it can be when a rider is thrown from their mount.

Camera: Sony a7 IV

Copyright: © Olivier Unia, France, Open Photographer of the Year, Open Competition, Motion, Sony World Photography Awards 2025

Professional Category Winner: Architecture & Design

Photographer: Ulana Switucha

Series title: The Tokyo Toilet Project

Description: The Tokyo Toilet Project is an urban redevelopment project in Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan that involves the design and construction of modern public restrooms that encourages their use. The distinctive buildings are as much works of art as they are a public convenience. These images are part of a larger body of work documenting the architectural aesthetics of these structures in their urban environment.

Camera: Nikon Z7

Copyright: © Ulana Switucha, Canada, Winner, Professional competition, Architecture & Design, Sony World Photography Awards 2025

Professional Category Winner: Creative

Photographer: Rhiannon Adam

Series title: Rhi-Entry

Description: Throughout history, 117 billion humans have gazed at the same moon, yet only 24 people – all American men – have seen its surface up close. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the artist discovered an application for the ultimate art residency: dearMoon. In 2018, Japanese billionaire and art collector Yusaku Maezawa announced a global search for eight artists to join him on a week-long lunar mission aboard SpaceX’s Starship – the first civilian mission to deep space.

The mission’s flight path would echo that of Apollo 8’s 1968 journey, which famously led astronaut Bill Anders to suggest NASA ‘should have sent poets’ to capture the sense of wonder he experienced. In 2021, Rhiannon Adam was chosen as the only female crew member from one million applicants, with the chance to achieve the seemingly impossible. For three years she immersed herself in the space industry, until, in June 2024, Maezawa abruptly canceled the mission, leaving the crew to pick up the pieces of their disrupted lives.

Camera & equipment: Polaroid SLR 680, RZ-67 pro II, Canon 5D MKIV, Wista Field, Apple Mac screenshot, iPhone 15 Pro Max, Canon EOS R

Copyright: © Rhiannon Adam, United Kingdom, Winner, Professional competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2025

Professional Category Winner: Documentary Projects

Photographer: Toby Binder

Series title: Divided Youth of Belfast

Description: ‘If I had been born at the top of my street, behind the corrugated-iron border, I would have been British. Incredible to think. My whole idea of myself, the attachments made to a culture, heritage, religion, nationalism and politics are all an accident of birth. I was one street away from being born my “enemy.”’ Paul McVeigh, Belfast-born novelist.

Binder notes ‘there is hardly any other country in Europe where a past conflict is still as present in daily life as it is in Northern Ireland.’ It is not only the physical barriers – the walls and fences – but also the psychological divisions in society. For many years, Toby Binder has been documenting what it means for young people, all of whom were born after the peace agreement was signed, to grow up under this intergenerational tension in both Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods.

Camera & equipment: Leica Q2, Mamiya 645 PRO TL

Copyright: © Toby Binder, Germany, Winner, Professional competition, Documentary Projects, Sony World Photography Awards 2025

Professional Category Winner: Environment

Photographer: Nicolás Garrido Huguet

Series title: Alquimia Textil

Description: Alquimia Textil is a collaborative project undertaken by Nicolás Garrido Huguet and researcher and fashion designer María Lucía Muñoz, which showcases the natural dyeing techniques practiced by the artisans of Pumaqwasin in Chinchero, Cusco, Peru. The project aims to bring visibility to, and help preserve, these ancestral dyeing practices, which demand many hours of meticulous work that is often underestimated within the textile sector.

Industrial methods are close to displacing these traditional dyeing processes completely, while climate change threatens the plants that are crucial to these practices. These photographs feature three dye types: qolle (Buddleja coriacea), a shrub with yellow-producing flowers; ch’illka (Baccharis sp.), a shrub whose leaves and stems yield ochre and green hues; and cochineal (Dactylopius coccus), an Andean insect producing reds, carmines and purples in a broad color spectrum.

Camera & equipment: EM, Epson scanner v550, Nikon Z7 II, Mamiya RB67

Copyright: © Nicolás Garrido Huguet, Peru, Winner, Professional competition, Environment, Sony World Photography Awards 2025

Professional Category Winner: Landscape

Photographer: Seido Kino

Series title: The Strata of Time

Description: This project invites viewers to consider what it means for a country to grow, and the advantages and disadvantages linked to that growth, by overlaying archival photographs from the 1940s-60s within current scenes of the same location. Early in Japan’s period of rapid economic growth from 1945 to 1973, the trade-off for affluence was pollution in many parts of the country. As an island, its land and resource constraints also led to an uneven population distribution.

Camera: Nikon D850

Copyright: © Seido Kino, Japan, Winner, Professional competition, Landscape, Sony World Photography Awards 2025

Professional Category Winner: Perspectives

Photographer: Laura Pannack

Series title: The Journey Home From School

Description: Making our way home from school is a simple, nostalgic, universal activity that we can all relate to. This project explores the tumultuous public lives of young people in the gang-governed Cape Flats area of Cape Town, South Africa, where their daily commute carries the risk of death.

Using handmade, lo-fi experimental techniques, this project explores how young people have to walk to and from school avoiding the daily threat of gang crossfire. Through poetry, analogue photography, drawings, collages and cyanotypes, an intimate portrayal of adolescence amidst stark social divides is created that offers a rare insight into this confusing and challenging world.

Camera & equipment: EZ Controller, 500cm

Copyright: © Laura Pannack, United Kingdom, Winner, Professional competition, Perspectives, Sony World Photography Awards 2025

Professional Category Winner: Portraiture

Photographer: Gui Christ

Series title: M’kumba

Description: M’kumba is an ongoing project that illustrates the resilience of Afro-Brazilian communities in the face of local religious intolerance. Its name derives from an ancient Kongo word for spiritual leaders, before it was distorted by local society to demean African religions. For more than 300 years, nearly 5 million African people were brought to Brazil.

They lost their freedom, and their spiritualities were persecuted by colonial ideologies. Until 1970, Afro-Brazilian religions were criminalised, and due to longstanding prejudice they still face violence – more than 2,000 attacks were reported in 2024 alone. Although 56 per cent of Brazilians are of Afro-descent, fewer than 2 per cent identify as Afro-religious due to fear of persecution.

As an Afro-religious priest in training, Gui Christ wanted to photograph a proud, young generation representing African deities and mythological tales. Through intimate imagery, this project challenges prejudice while celebrating these spiritual traditions as vital to Brazil’s cultural identity.

Camera: Canon EOS R5

Copyright: © Gui Christ, Brazil, Winner, Professional competition, Portraiture, Sony World Photography Awards 2025

Professional Category Winner: Sport

Photographer: Chantal Pinzi

Series title: Shred the Patriarchy

Description: M’kumba is an ongoing project that illustrates the resilience of Afro-Brazilian communities in the face of local religious intolerance. Its name derives from an ancient Kongo word for spiritual leaders, before it was distorted by local society to demean African religions.

For more than 300 years, nearly 5 million African people were brought to Brazil. They lost their freedom, and their spiritualities were persecuted by colonial ideologies. Until 1970, Afro-Brazilian religions were criminalised, and due to longstanding prejudice they still face violence – more than 2,000 attacks were reported in 2024 alone. Although 56 per cent of Brazilians are of Afro-descent, fewer than 2 per cent identify as Afro-religious due to fear of persecution.

As an Afro-religious priest in training, Gui Christ wanted to photograph a proud, young generation representing African deities and mythological tales. Through intimate imagery, this project challenges prejudice while celebrating these spiritual traditions as vital to Brazil’s cultural identity.

Camera: Canon EOS R5

Copyright: © Chantal Pinzi, Italy, Winner, Professional competition, Sport, Sony World Photography Awards 2025

Professional Category Winner: Still Life

Photographer: Peter Franck

Series title: Still Waiting

Description: Still Waiting presents collages that capture moments of pause, of waiting. They depict the liminal space between events, a threshold where time seems to stretch, and meanings remain unfixed. The juxtaposition of objects within the space leaves room for interpretation, inviting surreal flights of thought. Everything is suspended, held in a fragile equilibrium where intervention feels imminent. Just fractions of a second away from some decisive action, the images linger in a fleeting moment of stillness, a breath before the world moves again.

Camera: N/A (unknown)

Copyright: © Peter Franck, Germany, Winner, Professional competition, Still Life, Sony World Photography Awards 2025

Student Photographer of the Year

Photographer: Micaela Valdivia Medina

Series title: The Last Day We Saw the Mountains and the Sea

Description: This project explores the complexity of female prison spaces and the people who inhabit them, from the inmates to their families. The series consists of photographs of the architecture of the prisons, the neighbourhoods they are in, and the dynamics at the visitor and family member entrances. This project was carried out at the women's penitentiary centres of San Miguel, San Joaquín and Valparaíso, between the months of March and July 2024.

Camera & equipment: Canon EOS R, iPhone 12

Copyright: © Micaela Valdivia Medina, Peru, Student Photographer of the Year, Student Competition, Sony World Photography Awards 2025

Youth Photographer of the Year

Photographer: Daniel Dian-Ji Wu

Image title: Eclipse of Motion

Description: Daniel Dian-Ji Wu took this photo during summer break in 2024, at Venice Beach Skatepark in LA during golden hour. The photographer captured this image of a skater mid-air, silhouetted against the sunset, expressing the raw energy of that moment. He says this image ‘made me feel a sense of passion and freedom.’

Camera & equipment: Sony a7 IV

Copyright: © Daniel Dian-Ji Wu, Taiwan, Youth Photographer of the Year, Youth Competition, Sony World Photography Awards 2025

Source link