The Open and Youth winners along with the inaugural Mobile Phone winner of the world’s biggest photography competition, the Sony World Photography Awards, are announced today.

Drawn from the four corners of the world and covering a huge range of subjects, the winning photographers were chosen from over 96,000 entries to the 2015 Sony World Photography Awards.

The achievement of each of the 14 winners is extraordinary not only in terms of the competition they faced, but also the fact that these winners are largely not professional photographers; instead they are simply individuals who love photography. The youngest winning photographer is Stephanie Anjo from the United Kingdom who is just 14 years old and the winners are geographically spread from Mexico to Malaysia.

The Open and Youth competition winners were chosen by an expert panel led by Sam Barzilay, Creative Director of United Photo Industries. The Mobile Phone winner was selected following a public vote on the World Photography Organisation website.

Open Competition

• The winners of the single best shot from each of the ten Open categories are:
• Architecture – Armin Appel, Germany
• Arts & Culture – Hector Muñoz Huerta, Mexico
• Enhanced – Antony Crossfield, United Kingdom
• Low Light – Nick Ng Yeow Kee, Malaysia
• Nature & Wildlife – Antoine Weis, Switzerland/ Luxemburg (joint nationality)
• Panoramic – Norman Quinn, United Kingdom
• People – Saleh Rozati, Iran (lives in Austria)
• Smile – Wilson Lee, Hong Kong
• Split Second – Jaime Massieu, Spain
• Travel – Yasen Georgiev, Bulgaria

Youth Competition

For photographers aged 19 and under and judged on a single shot, the three Youth category winners are:

• Culture – Beatriz Mota da Rocha, Portugal (age 15)
• Environment – Yong Lin Tan, Malaysia (age 19)
• Portraits – Stephanie Anjo, United Kingdom (age 14)

Mobile Phone Competition

The Mobile Phone competition was introduced this year in recognition of the increased accessibility mobile phone cameras has given photographers and how this has allowed more people to capture everyday moments in our daily lives which would otherwise go unnoticed.

Open to photographers of all abilities and judged on a single image taken using any mobile phone camera, the inaugural winner and runners up are:

• Winner – Turi Calafato, Italy
• 2nd place – Janos M Schmidt, Hungary
• 3rd place – Ako Salemi, Iran

The winning image was chosen by the public via the World Photography Organisation website with 6, 718 votes. Entries to the Mobile Phone competition was open for just four weeks and in this time over 10,200 images were received. A shortlist of 20 images were selected by a panel of experts from across the photographic industry and public had just one week to decide their winner, in which time over 15,200 votes were cast.

Prizes

The winners of the Open, Youth and Mobile Phone competitions will each receive the latest Sony digital imaging equipment and Xperia™ smartphone and their images will be shown at the iconic Somerset House, London as part of the 2015 Sony World Photography Awards exhibition from 24th April – 10th May.

The Open and Youth category winners will now compete for the overall Open Photographer of the Year and Youth Photographer of the Year titles, which will be revealed at the Sony World photography Awards gala ceremony on 23rd April in London. The overall winners will be selected from the 13 category winners. The overall Open and Youth winners along with the Mobile Phone winner will be flown to London to attend the ceremony and the overall Open winner will also receive a $5,000 (USD) cash prize.

More information:
www.worldphoto.org