Over four years ago, Alex Nail and I were moaning about yet another poor showing in a landscape photography competition. Prompted by yet another discussion, Alex introduced me to Matt Payne and the Natural Landscape Photography Awards was born. At the time, our goal was to bring the authenticity requirements we saw in wildlife competitions (like the Wildlife Photographer of the Year) to landscape photography.

Who could have predicted the AI revolution would take the world by storm just a couple of years later? Since then, and prompted by a reaction against AI (and we hope with a little influence from our competition), many photographers are showing a little more restraint manipulating photographs to differentiate themselves from the escalating AI social image war.

Our other goal was to try to represent a more diverse range of landscape photography. Over the last few years I think we’ve definitely achieved that and with this year’s results (our fourth year) announced last week, we’re happy to see even more amazing images doing well. The image below is our overall winning image and, again, it was interesting to see how the judges opinion developed over time, falling more and more in love with it.

In our next issue we’ll show a few more of the winners and a selection of images that are going to appear in our fourth edition of our showcase book (due to go to print on the 1st November!).

Musical Ripples, John Hardiman, AU.
Rain drops falling from overhead gums made playful patterns on the waters surface, on a cool foggy morning in Tallarook State Forest.

Click here to download issue 312 (high quality, 62Mb)

Click here to download issue 312 (smaller download, 35Mb)