Minimalist Photography Awards 2026 - 3rd Place in Aerial
I'm thrilled to announce that my photograph 'The Long Shadow' has won third place in the Minimalist Photography Awards 2026, in the Aerial category. See below for the story behind the photograph!
The Long Shadow has placed third in the Aerial Photography category of the Minimalist Photography Awards 2026.
First and second in the category both went to series rather than single frames, which makes this the highest-placed individual photograph in Aerial this year. I'll take that.
About the awards
The Minimalist Photography Awards are run from Bregenz in Austria and were founded by the photographer Milad Safabakhsh. This is the eighth edition, the first having run in 2019. Entries this year came to more than 6,200 images from 66 countries, spread across twelve categories, from Abstract and Architecture through to Street, Portrait and Long Exposure.
Judging was handled by a panel of three: Sylvia Janschek, owner and director of the Sylvia Janschek ART Gallery; Hermann Präg, president of KunstVorarlberg; and Safabakhsh himself. The overall winner receives €2,000, a hand-crafted trophy and the title of Minimalist Photographer of the Year. Winning and honourable mention images go into the MPA annual book and an international exhibition.
The Aerial category was won by Marcin Giba of Poland with The Last Winter, a series of frozen lakes photographed from above near his hometown of Rybnik. Giba also took the overall title this year. It's a lovely, abstract body of work, shapes surface out of the ice that you can't quite unsee once you've noticed them, and it's a thoroughly deserved win. I've actually seen these kinds of ice patterns on frozen lochs up in Scotland, however I've never got the conditions or light to make them work photographically. This collection does inspire me to keep trying again though. Congratulations to him, and to Leszek Paradowski, who placed second with In Between Forces.
This was my first time entering the MPA. I went in on the assumption that the simplicity of this particular frame was the whole reason it works, and that a competition built around restraint might be the right home for it. That turned out to be a reasonable bet.
The photograph
I visit this Iron and Bronze Age site often. It's very local to me, and it gives an great vantage point over the Thames Valley and the Oxfordshire countryside.
On this particular morning, 1 March 2025, the first day of meteorological spring, mist sat low across the whole landscape. As the sun came up, the mist lifted with it, until it had covered most of the ground around a small group of beech trees standing on the barrow. The sun started casting shadows and crepuscular rays through other trees in the area, and I thought: surely it'll happen to the clump on Brightwell Barrow too.
I flew the drone into position. What I could see on the screen wasn't only rays coming through the trees, but a long dark shadow stretching out behind them. I worked the scene from several vantage points on the Air 2S, and this frame was the one.
The RAW file has had very little done to it. Some contrast, and a check that the colours matched what was actually there. The warm sunrise light coming through the mist is as it was. So is the cooler, bluer cast holding in the shadows on the far side of the hill, which was still slightly frosty at that hour. The shadow is what ties the warm side to the cold side, and if you look closely, the furrows in the field line up with it.
Where this image has been
I don't usually go in for listing an image's results, but this one has had a run I never anticipated when I pressed the shutter. The Long Shadow won the Drone category at the British Photography Awards 2025, and took first prize in the Nature category at the Drone Photo Awards 2025, part of the Siena Awards in Tuscany, an evening in the Teatro dei Rinnovati that I still think about to this day. It made the top 101 at the International Aerial Photographer of the Year, was covered by the BBC, and was picked by Digital Camera World as one of ten award-winning photographs of 2025. It also came 3rd in the International Photography Awards 'non-professional' Aerial category (I write this disapprovingly - I hate it when photographers are split on such an arbitrary thing).
Now a third place at the MPA on top of all that.
What has surprised me most isn't the results themselves but how consistently the picture seems to land with people, across very different judging panels and very different audiences. That's not really something you can plan for. I'm genuinely pleased it has resonated as widely as it has, and I don't take it for granted.
Most of you reading this will have seen the photograph before. Apologies for that: consider this a decent excuse to share it once more.
Prints are available. Just order through the links throughout or click on the photograph above.
Prints from this story
Every photograph here is available, signed and made by me.
