Some photographers peer through the lens. Others, like Joanna Steidle and Ignacio Palacios, peer from the stratosphere, transforming our notion of landscape into a kind of atmospheric choreography. In the inaugural International Aerial Photographer of the Year competition, 1,500 entries took flight—literally—showing the world from above, and in doing so, reminding us that the Earth has always had its own surrealist bent.

Organized by the team behind the International Landscape Photographer of the Year Awards, this new competition celebrates the audacious elevation of photography—both figuratively and geographically.

What unfolds is not a parade of technical gimmicks or Instagram gimmickry. These images are epics in miniature, fusing composition with cartography, abstraction with anatomy. The Earth becomes brushstroke, geometry, mystery.

Joanna Steidle: The Atlantic’s Poet Laureate

From her base in the Hamptons, American drone pilot Joanna Steidle delivered a grand prize-winning portfolio that flirts with marine metaphysics. Her drone hovers like a watchful seabird, capturing everything from the muscular elegance of whales to kaleidoscopic schools of fish spiraling in top-down harmony.

There’s a new frontier in aerial photography, I live on flat land, so I go vertical. The ocean gives me texture, story, rhythm.

– Steidle says.

Her works are not decorative. They reveal unseen networks, hinting at something more primordial than surface beauty—something felt in the bones before the eye even processes the form.

Ignacio Palacios: Light Geometry Over Cono de Arita

If Steidle gives us water, Ignacio Palacios gives us light—and its eerie twin, shadow. The Australian-based photographer captured Argentina’s Cono de Arita, a salt desert marvel, with anti-crepuscular rays slicing the sky like divine stage lighting.

Palacios’ winning image earned him the International Aerial Photograph of the Year title. It’s the kind of photograph that seems engineered by myth, perfectly balanced, achingly real yet abstract. The silence of the desert meets the spectacle of atmosphere in one shot.

Why Aerial Photography Still Feels Like Magic

As co-organizer Peter Eastway eloquently explains:

Looking down on our subject produces a novel, intriguing, and sometimes ambiguous perspective.

– As co-organizer Peter Eastway eloquently explains.

Indeed, there’s something existentially satisfying about looking at our world from above. Maybe it’s the shift in scale—the chance to see rivers as veins, cities as circuitry, humans as fleeting. Or maybe it’s that aerial photography returns mystery to the visible, disrupting our ground-level certainty.

The competition welcomed both drone operators and high-altitude adventurers—some used helicopters, others hot air balloons. But the results converged into a singular idea: Earth, viewed from above, is a painter, a cartographer, a surrealist, a minimalist, and a poet all in one.

The Future of the Sky as Canvas

The success of this first aerial photography competition signals something larger: a paradigm shifts in how we image the planet. As drones become more accessible and photographers more experimental, we may soon expect the sky to be as familiar a studio as the street once was.

But for now, these twenty winners have done something remarkable: they’ve made us look up and, in doing so, made us look again.

They’ve shown us that the Earth is not a backdrop, but a living canvas—shifting, refracting, undulating with secrets.