These 16 Splendid Aerial Views Capture Wildlife From Above, Revealing the Beauty and Mystery of Nature

The International Aerial Photographer of the Year competition has announced the winners of its second edition, with a newly released collection spotlighting animals photographed from directly overhead. Among the standout entries in the 2025 contest is a striking set of images that reframe familiar creatures — herds, flocks, and solitary animals alike — as abstract patterns and unexpected compositions when viewed from the sky.

The contest was founded by photographers David Evans and Peter Eastway, who first observed a surge of interest in bird's-eye-view photography within competition circles more than a decade ago. In a statement explaining the event's origins, Eastway recalled that judges consistently responded well to aerial entries, and that he and his peers had assumed the novelty would fade as the format became more common. Instead, he said, the appeal has only grown.

That sustained enthusiasm led Evans and Eastway to launch the aerial-focused competition in 2025, building on their experience running the International Landscape Photographer of the Year awards, a program the pair has organized together since 2014. The new contest gave them a dedicated venue for a genre they felt had outgrown its role as a niche category within broader landscape competitions.

For this year's event, only its second running, organizers received close to 1,600 submissions from photographers across the globe. Each photograph was reviewed and scored by a panel of three judges before the field was narrowed down to a final selection. The 101 highest-scoring images from that process have now been gathered into a downloadable e-book, giving the public access to the full scope of what judges considered the year's best work.

Within that broader collection, wildlife imagery has emerged as a particular draw, offering viewers a chance to see animals in a context rarely available from ground level. Photographs taken from drones or aircraft can reveal migration patterns, group formations, and habitat relationships that are difficult to capture, or even perceive, from a standard vantage point. The technique has become increasingly accessible as drone technology has grown cheaper and more widely available to photographers outside professional press or scientific circles.

The rise of aerial wildlife photography also reflects a broader shift in how nature imagery is produced and consumed. Where wildlife photography once relied almost exclusively on long lenses and ground-based blinds, overhead perspectives now let photographers document animal behavior with minimal disturbance to the subjects, a factor that has drawn interest from conservationists as well as artists. At the same time, the growing popularity of drones near wildlife has prompted some ecologists to caution that flight paths and altitudes need to be carefully managed to avoid stressing animals, an issue that aerial photography competitions and their entrants are increasingly expected to address.

Organizers have not indicated whether submission numbers will continue to climb heading into next year, but the jump from a first-year event to nearly 1,600 entries suggests the category is still gaining traction among photographers. With the e-book of finalists now public, the competition's founders appear positioned to keep building on the format they helped popularize within landscape photography circles over the past ten years.

Source: Smithsonian Magazine