Upon first take a look at this award-winning picture, you see a pair of youngsters napping within the solar forming an aesthetic, symmetrical composition – however the deeper that means, the backstory, stays illusive. However, look nearer and the true mastery of the body turns into clear.
After a second, your eye flutters to the shuttle cock within the bottom-left nook, and the shadowy define of a badminton racket reveals itself on the kids’s faces. Although these parts are proper in entrance of your eyes, it takes a second for them to return into focus, so to talk, and that is when the narrative lastly turns into clear.
These youngsters aren’t simply napping within the solar, they’ve been taking part in an lively recreation of badminton – and maybe it’s their buddy or household checking on them, racket in hand, that has revealed all. It’s not a monumental story, however the inventive use of shadows and light-weight is sensible of the scene, which to my eye has an summary high quality.
This is the work of Gellért Gombai, a business photographer from Hungary, which lately earned him the title of Photographer of the Year on the 2026 iPhone Photography Awards (IPPAwards).
The competitors celebrates images taken on Apple handsets, and Gellért used an iPhone X with camera settings of 4mm (28mm equivalent), 1/1500sec, f/1.8 and ISO20 to capture his shot.
Gellért’s image was selected from thousands of submissions across more than 140 nations, and I think what impressed the judges most was surely how he bent light and shadow to his will, using them to infuse layers into the brilliant black-and-white scene.
It’s one thing to achieve this kind of result on one of the best black-and-white cameras that use dedicated monochrome sensors in mirrorless bodies. But to get this tonality and look from an almost decade-old camera is a great achievement – and worthy of the IPPAwards recognition.
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