Two contests set the bar for drone photography in 2026: the International Aerial Photographer of the Year (IAPOTY), in its second edition, and the 11th Annual DJI SkyPixel Photo & Video Contest, the longest-running flagship drone-photo competition on the planet. Together they handed out roughly $200,000 in prizes, vetted entries from more than 96,000 submissions, and crowned a France-based Bangladeshi photographer, a Russian Federation–based photographer shooting in Chinese wetlands, and a Slovak pilot working out of northern Norway. The winning shots are strange, deliberate, and almost entirely free of the sunset-over-the-mountains clichés that dominate drone-photo Instagram.
This is the breakdown of every winning image, every contest, and the rules the judges applied — including the ethics layer that decides which drone pilots even get to compete in 2026 and beyond.
Two contests that defined drone photography in 2026
The IAPOTY 2026 winners were announced on July 7, 2026 via PetaPixel, My Modern Met, and Digital Camera World. The SkyPixel 11th Annual winners went live on April 27, 2026 via DJI’s official PR Newswire release and a coordinated PetaPixel gallery. Both announcements landed inside the same 12-week window, which is why the drone press has been calling 2026 a watershed year for the genre.
The two contests run on very different mechanics. IAPOTY is a blind, multi-round scored competition with a panel of photographer-judges that includes Peter Eastway, and it awards both a Photographer of the Year (portfolio) and a Photograph of the Year (single image). SkyPixel is a DJI-sponsored open call with a US$200,000 prize pool across three categories — Annual Best Photo, Annual Best Aerial Video, and Annual Best Handheld Video — judged by an industry-expert jury on technical mastery, narrative strength, color work, composition, and original use of elevated perspective, per the contest’s official rules documented by DroneArticles.
IAPOTY 2026 received 1,587 entries, per PetaPixel’s July 7 announcement. SkyPixel 2026 drew about 95,000 submissions, per the DJI PR Newswire release — down roughly one-third year-on-year, a decline flagged by DroneXL as a sign that even flagship contests are no longer insulated from the broader slowdown in consumer drone shipments.
Azim Khan Ronnie: a Bangladesh-born, France-based portfolio of rituals and labor
Azim Khan Ronnie, a France-based photographer originally from Bangladesh, was named the International Aerial Photographer of the Year 2026 for a portfolio of at least four images captured across Switzerland, India, and Bangladesh. The work includes rowers on Lake Zurich, migratory birds at Yamuna Ghat in Delhi, red chili harvesting in Bangladesh, and the Rakher Upobash Hindu ritual gathering near Dhaka, as catalogued by My Modern Met’s July 13 gallery and confirmed by PTTL.gr.
What makes Ronnie’s portfolio unusual for an aerial competition is that none of the four images are landscape scale. Three of them are overhead studies of human activity — rows of laborers, rows of worshippers, rows of birds on water — shot from straight down at moderate altitude. The fourth, the Lake Zurich rowing image, is the only one that reads as “wide” aerial photography. Together they argue a thesis: that the best drone photography in 2026 is closer to industrial photojournalism than to landscape spectacle.
Ronnie is no newcomer. He has accumulated more than 800 international awards across his career, per the Digital Camera World interview that accompanied the IAPOTY announcement. In that interview he framed the win as a continuation of an ethical-practice stance: “I am committed to ethical practices that preserve the integrity of the photograph,” he said, a line that matters more than it sounds — drone photography has spent the last five years working out what counts as ethical when a camera can be 400 feet above a crowd.
Runners-up in the IAPOTY 2026 portfolio competition were Chin Leong Teo and Barbara Brown, per the same PTTL.gr coverage. The full Top 25 gallery — which is the official IAPOTY output format — was reproduced on DIY Photography, with a separate Forbes-curated selection of 18 winners run on July 30, 2026.
Vitaly Golovatyuk’s ‘Birdie in the Sky’: one frame, one bird, one lake
The single-image top prize at IAPOTY 2026 went to Vitaly Golovatyuk for “Birdie in the Sky,” shot in November 2025 at Elk Park near Dongtai City, Zhejiang Province, China. The photograph shows a lone bird resting on a small, still lake surrounded by red grass, with a clear sky reflection that makes the bird appear to float in mid-air, per the My Modern Met and Sydney Morning Herald coverage.
Golovatyuk is based in the Russian Federation. The image was not a one-off — multiple IAPOTY 2026 honorees used overhead perspectives on single birds or small bird groups, which the Sydney Morning Herald noted as a clear 2026 thematic shift away from the wide-dune and city-grid aerial compositions that dominated the 2025 finalists.
The image is also technically tricky in ways that explain why the judges selected it. To get a clean water reflection that produces the “Birdie in the Sky” effect, the drone has to be hovering near-stationary at low altitude with a polarised lens oriented to cut surface glare, all while the bird itself stays on the water — a setup that compresses dozens of micro-decisions about wind, sun angle, and exposure into a single usable frame. Golovatyuk told the Russian press, summarised by Nemo Skva, that he prioritised patience over volume: a single hour of hovering in cold wind for one or two usable exposures, rather than the more common practice of capturing hundreds of frames in a single afternoon.
Filip Hrebenda’s ‘The Gate’: Mavic 3 Pro in a Norwegian stone arch
The SkyPixel 2026 Annual Best Photo went to Slovak photographer Filip Hrebenda for “The Gate,” captured in northern Norway in the autumn of 2025 with a DJI Mavic 3 Pro. The image shows a lone figure standing beneath a natural stone arch, surrounded by mountain silhouettes and dense morning fog, per the DJI PR Newswire release and the TechRadar interview.
Hrebenda’s prize included a Hasselblad X2D II 100C camera as part of the $200,000 prize pool, per DroneXL’s SkyPixel 2026 coverage. That detail matters: the Mavic 3 Pro already ships with Hasselblad’s L2D-20c aerial camera module, and SkyPixel’s grand-prize Hasselblad effectively continues the integration story — a DJI-platform winner migrating up into the standalone Hasselblad X-system ecosystem.
TechRadar described the winning image as “straight out of a fairyland” and noted that the judges specifically called out the “unique and otherworldly landscape” framing. That judgement tells you what the SkyPixel jury values in 2026: not the largest, not the most technically impressive, but the most unusual vantage on a scene that would otherwise look pedestrian from the ground.
The SkyPixel Top 10 video winners: Africa Unseen, Elsewhere, and what they tell us about drone cinematography
SkyPixel split the video category in two in 2026: Aerial and Handheld. Ellis van Jason won the Annual Best Aerial Video for “Africa Unseen,” and AYANG won the Annual Best Handheld Video for “Elsewhere The Gaze Can Always Arrive,” per the official PR Newswire release.
The split between Aerial and Handheld is new for SkyPixel and signals a deliberate shift toward recognising drone operators as cinematographers, not just as pilots. DroneXL noted that SkyPixel 2026 was the first year the contest allowed handheld footage shot on the same DJI cameras pilots use for aerial work — the DJI Osmo Pocket line, the Ronin 4D, and similar — to compete alongside aerial reels. AYANG’s win under that new category is the proof point.
The full Top 10 in each SkyPixel category, plus the Top 10 Photo list, is published on the SkyPixel winners page, with secondary listings reproduced by UAV Coach and 121Clicks.com. The breakdown reveals a consistent pattern: aerial reels built around long, slow pushes over relatively simple landscapes outperformed the high-energy, music-video-style cuts that dominated SkyPixel 2023 and 2024.
How the judges actually score an aerial photo in 2026
IAPOTY uses a blind, multi-round scoring system in which judges assign each entry a score out of 100. Entries are ranked, and top scorers advance to subsequent rounds for final determination of awards, per the Photo Contest Guru entry for IAPOTY 2026. SkyPixel’s jury evaluates entries on five criteria — technical mastery, narrative strength, color work, composition, and original use of elevated perspectives — per the contest’s official rules as documented by DroneArticles.
The two scorecards read differently on paper but converge in practice. Both reward what the SkyPixel jury calls “original use of elevated perspectives” — i.e. compositions that could only exist from a drone. A drone shot of a landscape that could have been taken from a helicopter scores low. A drone shot of a labor scene that could only exist at 60 meters straight down scores high. Ronnie’s IAPOTY portfolio is the textbook example: every one of his four winning frames is a composition that would be impossible at eye level.
Blind judging is the other consequential detail. IAPOTY judging is blind — judges don’t see the photographer’s name or nationality when scoring. That detail matters because the IAPOTY 2026 final round included entries from at least four continents, and the top finishers came from Bangladesh, the Russian Federation, and Slovakia — none of the obvious Western press-photography centers. SkyPixel does not run blind in the same way, but it does run a multi-stage screening with anonymised first-round reviews.
The ethics layer: airspace, permits, and the rules of ethical drone photography
Both IAPOTY and SkyPixel require proof of legal compliance with the airspace rules where a winning image was captured. Pilots flying in controlled airspace must produce a permit, a remote pilot certificate, or an equivalent local credential, and any image shot in restricted or prohibited airspace is disqualified regardless of quality. Ronnie has publicly emphasised that compliance posture as a core part of his practice — a position reinforced in the Digital Camera World interview — and it is increasingly the line that separates the contest-eligible pilots from the rest.
In the United States, that means a Part 107 certificate for any commercial drone operation, plus LAANC authorisation for controlled airspace around most airports. In Europe, the Open A1/A2/A3 categories under EASA’s regulations apply; in India, Digital Sky approval is mandatory. Winning pilots in 2026 have increasingly begun publishing their permit details alongside their entries, partly to forestall ethics complaints and partly because contest organisers have started asking for it up front rather than at the audit stage.
Outside the airspace-permit layer sits a softer ethics conversation. Felix Belloin‘s Wildlife-category win at National Geographic Traveller (UK)’s 2026 competition for a drone shot of a sleeping polar bear in Svalbard, per the official Nat Geo announcement, restarted a long-running debate about drone noise and wildlife disturbance. The 2026 contest rules tightened wildlife-shot distance requirements as a direct result. drone journalism reference to drone journalism reference: Marcus Westberg’s drone coverage of the Great Nile Migration — published in Nat Geo’s May 2026 issue as the first drone imagery of that migration ever captured — ran with the drone flown at 200+ meters specifically to stay outside the antelope’s disturbance radius.
What 2026 tells us about the next 12 months of drone photography awards
Three trends from this year’s winners will shape the next 12 months. First, overhead-photojournalism — straight-down frames of human activity — has moved from being a curiosity at IAPOTY 2025 to the dominant portfolio style at IAPOTY 2026. Expect more contests to formalise that category in 2027. Second, the Handheld Video category at SkyPixel is now a real category, and AYANG’s win under it signals that DJI-platform pilots are now competing across the same festival circuit as cinema camera operators. Third, the ~33% drop in SkyPixel 2026 submissions — flagged by DroneXL — tracks the broader consumer-drone shipment contraction, but it does not yet appear to have affected the average quality of entries. If anything, the lower submission count correlates with stronger winners.
Worth watching for the 2027 contest cycle (and for any drone pilot considering commercial viability of an aerial-photography side hustle): the Hasselblad X2D II 100C that Filip Hrebenda took home as part of his prize will get used as an aerial platform on a DJI Mavic 4-class aircraft at some point in the next year, and the resulting images will likely reset the technical ceiling for what a drone sensor can capture. The Hasselblad L2D-20c already powered Matt Deakin’s win of the 2026 Australian Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year for Ethereal Encounter, which is the first time a DJI Mavic 3-class camera has won a national-press photographer-of-the-year award.
The other watch item is geographic spread. IAPOTY 2026 honorees came from Bangladesh, the Russian Federation, Slovakia, and at least a dozen other countries; the runners-up Chin Leong Teo and Barbara Brown alone represent Singapore and the United States, respectively. SkyPixel’s winners came from Slovakia, an unstated country for Ellis van Jason’s “Africa Unseen,” and an unstated country for AYANG’s handheld entry. The next 12 months of drone photography are not going to be a Western-monoculture conversation — they are going to be a worldwide press-photography conversation in which the camera happens to be airborne.
Frequently asked questions
Who won the 2026 International Aerial Photographer of the Year?
Azim Khan Ronnie, a France-based photographer originally from Bangladesh, won the International Aerial Photographer of the Year (IAPOTY) 2026 Photographer of the Year title. Vitaly Golovatyuk won the Aerial Photograph of the Year single-image category for his photograph “Birdie in the Sky,” shot at Elk Park near Dongtai City, China in November 2025.
Who won the 11th Annual SkyPixel Photo and Video Contest?
Filip Hrebenda (Slovakia) won the Annual Best Photo for “The Gate,” shot on a DJI Mavic 3 Pro in northern Norway. Ellis van Jason won Annual Best Aerial Video for “Africa Unseen.” AYANG won Annual Best Handheld Video for “Elsewhere The Gaze Can Always Arrive.” Winners were announced on April 27, 2026 from roughly 95,000 submissions.
What was the prize pool for SkyPixel 2026?
The 11th Annual SkyPixel contest carried a US$200,000 total prize pool. Filip Hrebenda’s grand prize included a Hasselblad X2D II 100C camera along with cash and DJI gear.
How many entries did IAPOTY 2026 receive?
The 2nd-edition IAPOTY 2026 received 1,587 entries from photographers worldwide. The competition was launched in 2025 and is curated by a panel that includes photographer Peter Eastway.
What gear did the 2026 drone photography award winners use?
Filip Hrebenda shot “The Gate” on a DJI Mavic 3 Pro. Azim Khan Ronnie and Vitaly Golovatyuk did not publicly state exact drone models in the announcement coverage, but both are established DJI-platform photographers. Hasselblad’s L2D-20c aerial camera (built into the Mavic 3 Pro) has been used by Matt Deakin to win the 2026 Australian Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year for “Ethereal Encounter.”
Are drone photography contests regulated? Do winners need permits?
Winning entries in IAPOTY 2026 and SkyPixel 2026 are required to be legally compliant with the airspace rules where the photo was captured, and contest rules typically require submission of flight permits or geotag evidence for restricted airspace shots. Azim Khan Ronnie has publicly emphasized his commitment to ethical practice and preserving the integrity of the photograph.