These 10 Award-Profitable Drone Photos Deliver Sensible Photography to the Skies

The Siena Drone Photo Awards 2025 winners have been revealed, showcasing unimaginable aerial images throughout a various vary of topics, from landscapes to wildlife and even individuals.

Alongside 9 class winners, the Siena Awards chosen an general winner. This 12 months’s Drone Photo Awards “Photo of the Year” winner is German photographer Dennis Schmelz, whose unimaginable picture, “The Lone Horseman,” enthralled the judges.

Schmelz’s photograph reveals a lone rider on the prime of a rocky outcropping within the coronary heart of Cappadocia in Turkey. Schmelz captured this stunning blue-hour photograph on the primary night time of his winter journey to Cappadocia and used his drone to attain a singular, dynamic perspective of the scene. The Siena Awards provides that “Dennis managed to find a unique and breathtaking perspective that had never been captured before in this often-photographed landscape.”

Category Winners

Alongside the general winner, aerial photographers competed throughout eight classes, with a ninth devoted to drone videography. The class winners from this 12 months’s Siena Drone Photo Awards are featured under.

Urban

Photographer Mohammad Ataei Mohammadi’s photograph, “Swallowed,” took prime honors within the Urban class. The picture reveals the Artemia pleasure boat stranded on the dried lakebed of Lake Urmia in Iran. Following years of drought and poor water useful resource administration, together with agricultural overuse, the lake died, forsaking relics of its watery previous, like this boat.

Wildlife

Joanna Steidle’s outstanding photograph, “Another World,” gained the extremely aggressive Wildlife class. Steidle’s photograph reveals a top-down view of a fever of cow nostril rays splitting a faculty of menhaden fish. The image was taken simply off the coast of Southampton, England, this previous summer time.

Sport

People are so used to seeing main sporting occasions from conventional, ground-level views, however they make for excellent drone topics. Shimon Perlstein’s photograph, “Running on Salt,” reveals a big group of runners at daybreak operating within the Dead Sea Marathon. Each 12 months, runners from around the globe arrive within the Dead Sea Basin to run races at “the lowest point on Earth.”

People

“Aarti Under the Stars” by Thibault Gerbaldi reveals the Ganga Aarti ceremony at night time. Each night time in Varanasi, many individuals present as much as take part in sacred rituals, and it’s an nearly otherworldly spectacle from the air.

Nature

The prime prize within the Nature class went to Christopher Harrison for his photograph, “The Long Shadow.” Harrison captured this shot on the primary day of meteorological spring, as daylight filtered by way of early-morning mist.

Abstract

Pawel Zygmunt’s first-place photograph, “The Eye,” reveals an uncommon view of Hveravellir in Iceland. This geothermal pool appears to be like like an animal’s eye from above, making a placing optical phantasm.

Wedding

Husband-and-wife photograph and video group Oliver and Steph Prince captured this unimaginable shot of a newlywed couple atop a hill within the Isle of Skye in Scotland. It proved to be an exquisite, remoted location for an elopement.

Series

Dipanjan Pal’s sequence, “The Great Color Study: Vietnam,” gained the Series class. The aerial photograph sequence explores conventional professions in Vietnam, a few of which have been handed down from era to era for over 500 years.

Video

Aerial videographer Fran Arnau’s video, “The Soul of Bangladesh,” takes viewers on a visually placing, emotionally highly effective journey into Bangladesh, the place individuals’s lives, work, and cultural historical past are all intricately linked.

More From the Siena Drone Photo Awards 2025

Alongside the general winner and the 9 class winners above, every class additionally contains runners-up and extremely counseled images and movies. All the award-winners might be viewed on the Siena Drone Photo Awards website.

Image credit: Siena Drone Photo Awards 2025. All photographers are credited within the particular person captions.