Words Dolores O’Donoghue
From over 4,500 entries from around the world, the overall winner of the International Landscape Photographer of the Year 2021 is Aytek Çetin from Turkey.
Entrance to the International Landscape Photographer of the Year competition requires a portfolio of four entries from each photographer, and the judges agreed that all of Çetin’s photographs have a wonderful excitement and special mood about them. A particularly fascinating image from his collection is of Cappadocia’s magical ‘fairy chimneys’, a remarkable landscape of towering rock formations in Turkey.
Çetin comments, ‘The 60-million-year-old story of fairy chimneys and the fact they have been home to different civilisations for tens of thousands of years makes Cappadocia extremely mysterious for me. If you are lucky, you can visit there during hazy, atmospheric conditions with a soft light pushing through at sunrise or sunset.’
The winning photograph for a single image entry is Tanmay Sapkal from the USA. It was taken on Mount Tamalpais in Marin country, just north of San Francisco. Sapkal explains how he captured the shot: ‘It’s quite a special place for photographers as it stands above the local landscape which is engulfed in low coastal fog almost every summer evening. After shooting there tens of times over the last four years, I realised that I really liked the way fog looks when it is lit from underneath. I also realised that the comet would become visible in the north-west sky. It wasn’t possible to line up the comet exactly above the foreground as I wanted, so I decided to take two separate exposures. It took a couple of visits to get just the right amount of fog on the hills to create the dreamy setting and then I waited patiently for some cars to drive by and create a blanket of light under the fog.’
Featured image: Primeval Arch and Columns, Mono Lake, Lee Vining, CA, USA. Photo: Simon Xu, Shortlisted
The top 101 images can be viewed at www.internationallandscapephotographer.com
- ‘Masters of the Landscape: International Landscape Photographer of the Year’ is published in Anthology Volume 17. Read more features from this volume or buy it now.
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