Aerial Debut Delivers Top Winner as Epson Pano Awards Entries Rise 20%

The 17th Epson International Pano Awards drew 4,084 entries from 93 countries in 2026, an increase of almost 20% over 2025, and a new Aerial category produced the competition's overall Open winner in its first year. Spain's Daniel Viñé Garcia took Open Photographer of the Year, the Open Aerial category win and The RAW Planet Award, while fellow Spaniard Tomás Sánchez Ruiz claimed Amateur Photographer of the Year plus the Amateur Nature/Landscape category.

Entry splits tell the structure of the contest: 2,122 photographs competed in the Open division and 1,962 in the Amateur division. The Open division ran categories for Built Environment, Nature/Landscape and the new Aerial; the Amateur division fielded Nature/Landscape and Aerial. Specialty awards sat alongside the category structure, with Photographer of the Year titles going to the highest-scoring entrants in each division.

The Aerial categories attracted 680 entries in their debut year. Contest founder David Evans said the number reflects sustained demand from entrants: "In the 17-year history of The Epson Pano Awards, never has a request from entrants been stronger than the addition of a dedicated Aerial category."

What does the aerial win look like?

Viñé Garcia's winning image, "The Sleeping Giant," shows the Parinacota Volcano in Chile, which rises above 6,300 meters, alongside Pomerape at more than 6,200 meters. He spent three days and three nights acclimatized at roughly 4,500 meters above sea level to secure the shot in the final light of sunset, when the landscape took on magenta tones.

The technical detail matters for anyone weighing panorama workflows. The original capture was a 360-degree aerial panorama assembled from 33 individual exposures, later cropped to concentrate the composition on the volcanoes and high-altitude lakes.

His second Open entry, "Cathedral of Starlight," was shot at around 3,100 meters in the Argentine Puna, where wind-sculpted white pumice formations sat beneath a sky nearly free of light pollution. He waited until the Galactic Centre climbed high enough for the Milky Way to arc across the frame. A third frame, "My Perfect Night," came from a Catamarca salt flat above 3,300 meters, near the settlement of Antofalla, a community of a few dozen people whose generator switches off at night.

Who else won?

The full list of recognized photographers:

• Tomás Sánchez Ruiz (Spain) — Amateur Photographer of the Year and Amateur Nature/Landscape winner. His "Double Arch over Stokksnes" captured the Vestrahorn mountains in Iceland under a strong aurora on a night when the forecast looked poor and freshly fallen snow covered the black sand. A second frame came after ten years of returns to the location, with the aurora dancing for more than two hours. His Built Environment entry, a stitched panorama of the Henry VII Chapel at Westminster Abbey, was photographed in December 2023.
• Max Terwindt (Netherlands) — Curator's Award for an Antarctic Peninsula aerial panorama, flown under a special drone license from two sailing ships; the sunset faded directly into sunrise in the Antarctic summer light.
• Mikel Iraeta (Spain) — Open Nature/Landscape winner, for a Milford Sound, New Zealand nightscape combining 107 separate photographs: two tracked eight-panel sky panoramas of four stacked 45-second exposures each, plus a 14-panel 360-degree foreground with three-frame brackets. Milford Sound receives rain roughly 300 days a year, which made the single clear, moonless, cloudless night the image required a matter of luck, in his telling.
• Xuecheng Liu (USA) — Open Built Environment winner, for a black-and-white aerial panorama of Times Square stitched from 25 frames.
• Wutimet Bunyasirisith (Thailand) — Southeast Asia Open Photographer of the Year, for an aurora arch over Skagsanden Beach, Norway, shot when even a 12mm lens could not contain the display in one frame.
• Preeti & Prashant Chacko (India) — Epson Digital Art Prize 2026, for a running group of southern white rhinos at Solio Game Reserve, Kenya, where the rhino population has been rebuilt without de-horning.
• Marcio Esteves Cabral (Brazil) — VR/360 Photographer of the Year, for an underwater 360-degree panorama in Cenote El Edén, Mexico, lit with carefully positioned flashes over a delicate clay floor.
• Xuejun Long (China) — Amateur Aerial winner, for flamingos over the mineral patterns of Lake Magadi, Kenya, captured in March 2024 during a seasonal transition that lasts only days.
• Sebastián Cantos Navalon (Spain) — Amateur Built Environment winner, for an eight-shot composite of a concrete spiral staircase at the Reina Sofía Palace of the Arts in Valencia, photographed in 2026.

What does this change for working panorama photographers? The 680-entry debut of the Aerial category signals a competition actively expanding to accommodate drone-based panoramic work rather than folding it into existing categories, and the near-20% entry growth indicates the market for panoramic competition visibility remains strong. Whether the Aerial categories hold or grow those numbers in 2027 will be the metric to watch.