By Washington Post Staff | Sep 6, 2022
With many pandemic-era travel restrictions in the rearview mirror, we are out in the world again. The winning entries in our 23rd annual photo contest were captured all over the globe, but they are connected by a common thread — gratitude. They share an appreciation for life’s everyday wonders, be they small (the tidiness of a shoeshine station or the shimmer of a fish’s scales) or large (the thrill of a lightning strike or the vast expanse of a night sky). Travel hones our awareness of wonder at any scale. Here are the three top winners and 10 honorable mentions in this year’s competition.
Guenther shot the winning image during a month-long trip to England and Northern Ireland in May. She and her husband, both amateur photographers who specialize in architecture, had visited London before, but never Leadenhall Market, a covered market that dates to the 14th century. She took this photo of a young woman shining a man’s shoes just before noon and was struck by the intimacy and order of the scene. “I’m a very neat and orderly person, and she’s obviously taking pride in what she’s doing,” she recalls. Guenther, who is a retired senior executive at the Pentagon, made the image black and white to emphasize the details, such as the neat rows of polish containers and brushes. She used an Olympus OM-1 film camera with a 40-150mm F2.8 lens, and shot at 52mm, a fast setting, to catch the motion without blurring.
Tomer photographed this scene on a trip to Geographic Harbor in Alaska’s Katmai National Park. He found himself on a beach with the grizzly bear cubs during a four-day Natural Habitat Adventures trip last September. The group visited several harbors to spot bears and had just disembarked from a tender. “We basically walked the bears’ path,” said Tomer, who is chief executive of a consulting firm. He shot the photo about 90 feet away from the bears, using a Sony a7 III camera with Sony FE 100-400mm lens to capture the cubs’ expressive faces. The trip was one in a series Tomer has taken to photograph wild animals; he’s seen polar bears in Manitoba, Canada, mountain gorillas in Uganda and various animals on safaris. “It was amazing watching them and the guides did a great job explaining how to interact with them so they didn’t get spooked,” he said.
Maupin took this photo during a June trip to Boneyard Beach in Hunting Island State Park in South Carolina. The beach is famous for its driftwood forest, a collection of bare trees that the waves swallow in high tide. Maupin mounted a Nikon Z6 II on a tripod and used a 20mm lens to capture this scene. Before that happened, he worked hard to get the shot: After seeing pictures of the beach at sunrise at an art gallery in Richmond, he made the nearly seven-hour drive and spent three hours on the beach waiting for optimum conditions; he took this photograph around midnight. It was a sticky, windy night and he frequently wiped sand from his camera lens, but he’s pleased with the final image. “I went for the trees,” he said. “The Milky Way is just a sky and if you didn’t have something in the foreground [the photos] would all look alike, and I thought the trees would be interesting and stark.”
DuBois took this detail shot of a building in the Alfama neighborhood in Lisbon. A retired Navy captain who worked in the defense industry, DuBois happened upon the scene while wandering the narrow, winding cobblestone streets beneath St. George’s Castle on a June trip with his wife and another couple. He snapped the photo with a Canon Coolpix camera. “The contrast of textures from the coarse old stones to the crumbling plaster walls create an interesting visual, and the quaint blue window draws the viewer into the scene,” he said. He speculates that the fish on the door could be a Christian symbol or denote that a fisherman once lived there. For DuBois, the joy of travel photography doesn’t stop once a photo is taken — he often turns his pictures into oil paintings, and is excited about beginning this rendering.
Richard C. Brundage, 42, Washington, D.C.
The purple hues and orange horizon make it easy to mistake this scene for a Martian landscape, but it was captured at dawn along Skyline Rim in Factory Butte, Utah. Brundage, who works for the National Endowment for the Humanities, took the photo on a solo backcountry camping trip that had been rescheduled from 2020. He was drawn in by the remote area’s otherworldly vistas and majestic rock formations. Getting this shot took some planning: Brundage slept near the site and awoke about a half-hour before sunrise to mount a Canon EOS R5, fitted with a Canon 16-35mm wide-angle lens, on a tripod. Then he set the timer to two minutes and walked — very carefully — onto the outcropping. “My hands were shaking as I walked out there,” he recalled. He wore a red jacket to make the image pop and to combat the chilly morning air.
Lugerner, a retired nurse, snapped this photo of a road runner in a hurry on a June trip to Rio Grande City, Tex. She was in South Texas on a photography trip with friends and hoped to capture mammals and birds she couldn’t see at home in Maryland. It was a hot morning, and Lugerner’s group had settled near a watering hole when she spotted this bird running toward her from across the water. She used a Sony a1 Mirrorless camera with a 200-600mm lens to take the photo and paid particular attention to keeping the bird’s eyes in focus. She took dozens of images, but “this was the one shot where he was coming straight at me, and I was quite thrilled with it.” Although she doesn’t consider herself a birder, Lugerner is a passionate bird photographer; she took up the hobby after retiring in 2014 and found wildlife her favorite subject to photograph.
Lee, a retired cardiologist, took this photo on the Grand Canyon’s South Rim during a lightning and monsoon photography workshop last August. The group checked the forecast, saw a thunder cell forming and drove to the location hoping to capture it. Lee set up quickly and snapped this image around 6:40 p.m. after about 15 minutes of waiting. He used a Nikon Z7 II camera with a Nikon NIKKOR Z 14-24mm lens; he also used a lightning trigger, a gadget that activates the shutter when lightning strikes. He was taken with the cloud’s mushroom shape and the contrast of the storm’s microclimate and the blue sky. “There’s something about capturing beautiful landscapes that’s hard to describe and you want to preserve that memory,” he said. “This lightning is probably 30 or 40 miles away, but even at that distance you can appreciate its tremendous force.”
Engelhardt, a graphic designer, created this image during a June trip with his family to Bailey Island on Casco Bay in Harpswell, Maine. The state’s dark skies and lack of light pollution make it an ideal place to see and photograph the night sky. He hadn’t planned to take nighttime images but decided to after visiting this beach during the day. He went on two consecutive nights: the first with his two sons, when “the sky was crystal clear and you could see the Milky Way clear as day,” and the second alone, when he got this shot. Engelhardt stood on the beach “for a good hour” waiting for the clouds to part and snapped multiple photos with his Nikon D7500, which was mounted on a tripod and fitted with a Tamron 18-400mm lens; he took panoramic photos with a 20-second exposure over the course of about two hours. This image is a composite, as is typical with Milky Way photography.
Warren, a retired attorney, took this photo on the beach in San Juan Del Sur, Nicaragua, after finishing a month-long language school session. When he turned 50, Warren decided he wanted to learn Spanish; he achieved an intermediate level during the pandemic, and this language school trip was the first trip he took after being vaccinated. As a student at the Instituto Estelar Bilingüe in Liberia, Costa Rica, Warren lived with a local host and spoke almost exclusively in Spanish. He explored Central America for about three weeks after school let out. While waiting for dinner at a beachside restaurant, Warren photographed a group of children playing soccer against the setting sun. “I knelt down in the sand and put my camera really low because I wanted the figures silhouetted against the spectacular sunset,” he said. He took multiple shots on his Sony a6300, which was fitted with an 18-105mm midrange telephoto lens. He is still out exploring — he took a call from The Post from Tromsø, Norway.
Fishner and his wife embarked on their first major post-pandemic trip, a three-week journey through Spain and France that had been postponed twice, in June. This photo was taken in Arcachon, a popular seaside resort town in southwest France, on a “magnificent, cool summer day.” The rest was serendipity: “We had a wonderful day walking along the beach and hiking, and we happened upon this house when we were walking back to our car,” Fishner remembered. The recently retired attorney and consultant snapped the photo with his iPhone 12 from across the street; he was struck by the bright yellow Citroen Deux Chevaux, an iconic French car, and how the colors popped in the natural light.
Mark Gadomski, 67, Hollywood, S.C.
Gadomski, a retired defense contractor, snapped this photo in the kitchen of Sobrino de Botín on a March trip to Madrid. The restaurant, listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest in the world, is famous for its roasted suckling pigs, visible on the shelves to the left of the massive open hearth. In for lunch during a quiet afternoon, Gadomski was exploring the restaurant and happened upon the kitchen. He captured this scene with a Canon EOS M6 and a wide-angle 9-22mm lens; the petite camera is his go-to choice when traveling in big cities because it’s discreet and easy to pack. He came upon the scene unexpectedly and was impressed by the chef’s concentration. “It was hot in that oven area, and he was so intent on his work that I don’t think he noticed me.”
Laurenza took this photo during a photography group trip to Yellowstone National Park in February. The retired attorney got the shot at Midway Geyser Basin, on the final stop of a 10-hour day spent photographing wildlife and landscapes. Laurenza used a Sony a7 R II fitted with an 18-135mm telephoto lens. He shot at ISO 50 with an f20 setting. “Even though it was a fairly cloudy day, the light reflecting off the steam was so bright and I had to control for that exposure,” he said. Laurenza converted the nearly monochromatic image to black and white. “I used a light blocking filter and experimented with different settings to get the best exposure, which ended up being a slightly long exposure, so that’s why you see the soft look of water and steam.”
Gary Ziesés, 72, San Francisco
This photo of a group of grunt sculpin, or grunt-fish, was taken by Ziesés on a trip to Cozumel, Mexico, in January. A retired tech executive and certified scuba diver who has logged 1,000 dives, he used an Olympus TG-5 waterproof camera with a built-in lens to photograph the school of fish in a protected underwater marine park in the Mesoamerican Reef. He slowly swam toward the fish and used his flash to highlight their shimmer and coloring — the flash is instantaneous, so the fish weren’t startled and were on their way shortly after, he said. Underwater photography isn’t easy, but this shot presented an added challenge: The area is known for its “drift diving,” and the constant current makes it tough to stay in one place. “It made that image that much more special because it is more challenging here to get a good image because you’re getting pulled along by the current,” Ziesés said.
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Interviews and captions by Helen Carefoot. Photo editing by Mark Gail.