Native pet photographer awarded photographer of the 12 months

Liz Dranow is 2025’s photographer of the 12 months. 

That’s based on the Intermountain Professional Photographers Association, who awarded Dranow at its pictures competitors in November based mostly on her high-scoring pictures, which received two first-place awards, a second and a 3rd place. 

Dranow beat out 24 different artists getting into almost 200 pictures in 11 classes. Five Professional Photographers of America-trained Master Judges outdoors of Utah judged every work utilizing the rigorous 12 Elements of a Merit Image, which consider areas comparable to visible affect, composition, lighting, technical excellence, storytelling and extra.

Her pictures focuses on professionally capturing and immortalizing animal companions by means of her enterprise, Time Punk Pet Photography. By day she’s a biostatistician on the University of Utah’s School of Medicine and even volunteers at Salt Lake County Animal Services taking images of animals awaiting adoption. 

It’s a prestigious title, mentioned Dranow’s friends and fellow members of the Park City Photography Club, who additionally competed within the occasion. 

“Liz is to be congratulated,” David Breslauer mentioned, “because she just didn’t win a bunch of awards. She won a nice overall award being photographer of the year. The competition is pretty steep because she’s going up against a lot of other professional photographers that have been doing it for a really, really long time and are really quite talented. This is a big deal.”

For years, Dranow has been working to enhance her technical abilities in an effort to higher seize life’s companions. She is in her second 12 months of a three-year pet pictures course by means of a bunch known as Unleashed Education, and considered one of her first-place photographs really got here from when she was out exploring with a canine as a part of her coursework, on the lookout for a very completely different shot. 

“Symbiosis,” first place in animal portraiture, exhibits a canine on Antelope Island at sundown. The canine, named Ludo, perches its entrance legs up and appears out to the lake as twilight shadows over Fremont Island within the background. Ludo’s pose is stable, assured, and every leg is clearly outlined and bathed in golden mild. His ears are relaxed, which exhibits he’s however not alert, a troublesome second to seize a canine in, Dranow mentioned. The impeccable composition evokes a way of exploration not in contrast to the well-known “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” by Caspar David Friedrich.    

“We were out, and the sun was starting to come down, and he was just standing up there looking all majestic,” Dranow mentioned. “And I’m like, ah, this is really cool. This is really pretty. And so I played around with this to be able to get where there was enough of the depth of field to be able to actually get Fremont island there in the background but still have him in focus, as though he’s gazing out across the lake.”

That’s deceptively difficult. Dranow mentioned a objective for her these days has been to take extra photographs of canine and animals in landscapes, which presents a technical problem with an enormous inventive payoff. She attracts a line between the significance of the atmosphere and pets, how each are essential to our survival in their very own means. It’s a part of why she titled this picture “Symbiosis.” 

“We can’t exist without the lake … Just as we can’t exist without our dog,” Dranow mentioned. “I was trying to tie in that same connection that we have with our pets, but also tying into the connection that we have with our landscape and how really important that was.”

While Dranow had different award-winning photographs this 12 months, she mentioned “Symbiosis” encapsulates what she’s making an attempt to do along with her work. In 2025, her capacity could have lastly caught as much as her ambition. 

“I have put a lot of effort in the last several years to really up my skills,” she mentioned, “I’ve had the very big goal of, I want to be better … so that I could be able to, if I had a mental image of what I wanted, to be able to technically do that. And now I’m really taking those and putting it towards the creative side of things.”

Dranow’s different first-place award was for male portraiture with “Devotion,” a picture of a person embracing his canine. This was a photograph for a consumer, Dranow mentioned, and she or he submitted it for the competitors as a result of it was a very significant shoot, considered one of what she calls “end of life sessions.” 

“This (photo), honestly, there’s a fair amount of things that could be done better with it,” Dranow mentioned. “But the thing that really just grabbed me with this session is that this guy and his dog just had such this amazing connection.” 

Four of the 5 competitors judges at first dismissed the picture for its technical shortcomings, comparable to errant hairs on the person’s jacket that they mentioned distracted creatively from the picture. One choose fought again, and ultimately the picture received first. 

The bond on show was robust sufficient to beat the picture’s weaknesses, Dranow mentioned. In truth, the canine handed away per week or so after the session.

“The guy was very aware that the dog wasn’t going to be with him much longer,” she mentioned. “He was starting to get emotional with his dog, which happens quite a bit, and I understand that, and I really try to give people the space to feel that.” 

Dranow mentioned she was struck by how the 2 checked out one another. Both ageing, in a second they touched their grey hairs collectively, and Dranow felt their profound connection — and captured it. 

“This dog is not going to leave his heart,” she mentioned. “He may not physically be with him, but they’re going to be there.”

Dranow shot the picture with an extended lens from distant. With photographs like this, you need the themes to really feel like they’re actually with one another, not posing for a digital camera. The connection must be actual. 

“I knew when I got it,” she mentioned. “That was the one that I’m going to keep.”

Dranow’s different two profitable photographs had been “Warmth On Winter’s Shore” and “Lift-Off!,” which received second and third place in animal portraiture, respectively. “Warmth” exhibits a canine wanting on the digital camera because it stands on a lake’s edge. Its paws are moist and muddy, and the water behind continues to be and glassy. “Lift-Off!” exhibits a canine leaping within the snow. 

Those photographs, mixed along with her two first-place awards, netted Dranow sufficient advantage to be thought of photographer of the 12 months. 

“Honestly, I’m extremely pleased and honored that I did get the photographer of the year,” she mentioned, “because this is, again, something that I really have been working hard on. And so I’m very, very flattered and honored that I actually got that.”

Dranow additionally partially credit her progress as a photographer to her experiences with the Park City Photography Club, which meets on the second Monday of each month on the Park City Library. Anyone is welcome, she mentioned, and might attend or attain out through the membership’s Facebook web page at fb.com/teams/ParkCityPhotographyClub.

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