A Winning Year

Exploring the woods of Canada with a snow-dusted fox, watching the stars from under a cave on the Northern California coast, cheering front row at an action packed Arizona rodeo, or unearthing the inner workings of a family heirloom, this year’s prize winners captured mementos of lives well lived—and well photographed. Read on to find out the creative ways our readers used their cameras to skillfully depict their worlds.

- Sara Cravatts

Landscapes

Janne Kahila, 26, data analyst, Espoo, Finland

When Janne Kahila first saw a photograph of the Vøringsfossen waterfall in Eidfjord, Norway, he knew he had to go see it for himself. “The valley and the waterfalls from both sides made the scene look almost prehistoric, which really gripped my attention,” Kahila remembers. Visiting an hour before sunset on a September evening, the photographer composed using the flowing stream as a leading line for the viewer’s eye. Both overall and graduated neutral-density filters let him set a long exposure. “I was fascinated by the way the light diffused through the fog in the valley and reflected from the stream,” he says. Kahila crafted his panoramic final frame by merging in Adobe Photoshop three separate vertical images captured with the same camera settings, after editing each individually in Photoshop Lightroom.

TECH INFO: Canon EOS 6D with 16–35mm f/2.8 Canon EF USM lens with 8-stop graduated neutral-density and 6-stop neutral-density filters, mounted on a Velbon GEO E630 tripod. Exposure, 2 sec at f/9, ISO 200; edited in Photoshop CS6 and Lightroom 5.

Objects & Still Life

Rodney Furgason, 72, retired, Topeka, Kansas