The latest winners of the Close-up Photographer of the Year competition have been revealed! Australian photographer Ross Gudgeon has won the grand prize of the seventh edition of the competition with ‘Fractal Forest’, an extraordinary underwater image photographed inside a cauliflower soft coral in the Lembeh Strait, Indonesia.
CUPOTY is an international photography competition dedicated to revealing the hidden wonder of the world through macro, micro and close-up imagery. The seventh edition of the competition attracted over 12,000 entries from 63 countries. A jury of 22 expert photographers, naturalists and editors spent more than 20 hours on Zoom calls to select the winners and Top 100 images.
Close-up Photographer of the Year – Fractal Forest by Ross Gudgeon
About his winning photo Ross said, ‘Named for its cauliflower-like form, this soft coral is made up of countless small, rounded polyps that give it a puffy texture. I wanted to explore a perspective that isn’t possible with conventional lenses, and an underwater probe lens allowed me to do that. By carefully threading the lens through the coral’s branches without disturbing them, I was able to photograph the subject from the inside looking-out, offering a different view of a common marine organism.’ The image earned Gudgeon the competition’s top award and a £2,500 prize.
This year’s winning images span 11 categories, with subjects ranging from frog spawn resembling a galaxy and a ghost-like swarm of mayflies approaching a Hungarian town, to an ice-covered tree in Nagano and a fantastical landscape created by oxidising a copper plate with household materials.
‘This was the toughest competition yet,’ says CUPOTY co-founder Tracy Calder. ‘The winning image embodies everything close-up photography can achieve – it shows us a perspective we’ve never seen before and reveals hidden beauty in a familiar subject. The judges were captivated.’
Further reading:
- 10 amazing street photographs we loved this month
- See the fantastic winners from this prestigious bird photography competition
- Here are the absolute best cat photos you’ll see on the internet today
- Vote for the best wildlife photograph from Wildlife Photographer of the Year!
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