中文There is a moment, standing on a cold beach in Norway at 3am with your camera pointed at the Northern Lights, when you realise you have waded into icy seawater just to get the shot. That is the kind of obsession the Epson International Pano Awards celebrates — and this year, for the first time in its 17-year history, it finally gave those sky-chasers their own stage.
The 2026 edition of the world’s largest panoramic photography competition just announced its winners, and the numbers alone are staggering: 4,084 entries from 93 countries, up 19% on last year. Of those, 2,122 were in the Open competition and 1,962 in the Amateur — but the headline is the brand-new Aerial category, which pulled in 680 entries on its own. For 17 years, entrants had been asking for a dedicated division for drone and high-altitude work. The organisers finally listened, and the results are breathtaking.
Spanish photographer Daniel Viñé Garcia took Open Photographer of the Year. His winning image, The Sleeping Giant, was shot at the Parinacocha Volcano in Chile, rising over 6,300 metres alongside its neighbour Pomerape at more than 6,200 metres. The original capture? A 360-degree aerial panorama stitched from 33 individual exposures. “After one last burst of light, the landscape gradually took on magenta tones,” he said, describing how he later reframed the full panorama to focus on the volcanoes and the light. That is the craft of panoramic photography in a sentence: patience, technical discipline, and an eye for when the world briefly aligns.
The Amateur Photographer of the Year title went to another Spaniard, Tomás Sánchez Ruiz, who won the Amateur Nature and Landscape category with a shot of a double arch over Stokksnes in Iceland. He almost missed it — the aurora forecast that night was unpromising, but when he pulled back the hotel curtain and saw green in the sky, he knew. The black sand was covered in fresh snow, and there he was, finally getting the photograph he had waited for, smiling.
What makes this competition matter to the printing world? Epson Australia, the main sponsor alongside Epson Southeast Asia, frames it as a benchmark for where the craft is heading. Craig Heckenberg, Managing Director of Epson Australia and New Zealand, noted that the aerial category shows why the Pano Awards have stayed relevant for 17 years — they respond to what photographers actually do. And photographers, in turn, need somewhere to show their work. That is where wide-format and fine-art printing come in: a 107-frame composite of Milford Sound, or a 33-exposure volcano panorama, only becomes a “wow” on a wall, printed large, with the depth and colour intact.
The technical feats are genuinely humbling. Mikel Iraeta of Spain won Open Nature and Landscape with Double arch on Milford Sound — a place that rains 300 days a year — by combining 107 different photographs. Xuecheng Liu of the US won Open Built Environment with a 25-frame aerial stitch of Times Square. Max Terwindt of the Netherlands earned the Curator’s Award for Antarctic Nights, shot under a special drone license during an Antarctic summer where sunset fades into sunrise.
For printers and print buyers, the takeaway is simple but powerful: this is the kind of content that demands to be printed big. A panorama is, by definition, wider than life, and it loses its magic at thumbnail size. The photographers who enter these awards are exactly the customers high-end print labs and wide-format shops should be courting — people who care about colour accuracy, scale, and the difference between “good enough” and “frame-worthy.”
The 17th Epson Pano Awards proved that giving a community what it has been asking for pays off. The aerial perspective, the organisers said, opens up so much of the world above tripod level — and the panoramic format suits it beautifully. Next year, with the category established, expect those numbers to climb again.
Source: WhatTheyThink
