The 2025 Epson International Pano Awards just crowned their winners, and the selection tells you something interesting about what photographers are seeing right now. Among 3,423 entries, a striking number captured the Northern Lights — more than any previous year. That's no coincidence. We're at the peak of the sun's 11-year activity cycle, meaning the aurora has been putting on a show that photographers simply couldn't resist.
Alex Wides, an Italian photographer, took home the top prize with "Last Fireworks," a 360-degree panorama of a desert sunset that required him to rotate methodically around a single point while the sky literally burned. He describes standing there as the sun dropped: "Layer after layer of clouds lit up, painting the desert with fire and gold." That kind of image — one that captures a fleeting moment of natural drama across an impossibly wide frame — is exactly what panoramic photography does best. It forces you to see the scale of what's happening.
The other winners reveal how varied this category has become. Kevin Nyun won Amateur Photographer of the Year for work shot in the Bolivian highlands, capturing landscapes that stretch across the frame in ways traditional photography simply can't match.
We're a new kind of news feed.
Regular news is designed to drain you. We're a non-profit built to restore you. Every story we publish is scored for impact, progress, and hope.
Start Your News Detox
But what's genuinely striking is how these images document both wildness and human presence. Daniel Viñé Garcia won the Digital Art Prize for "Tides of Tradition," a panorama of salt workers in Hoi An, Vietnam. His description cuts to something deeper: "These women, working in morning shade and salt-laden air, are the unseen guardians of sustenance." The panoramic format lets him show the full scale of their labor — the nets, the water, the community all at once.
Other winners captured moments that feel almost impossible to frame any other way. A humpback whale passing an island in Tonga. Fireflies glowing across Taiwan. A lion and a tiny lizard sharing the Serengeti. The panoramic format doesn't just make these moments bigger — it makes them feel more real, more present.
Wides also won again with "Jackpot," captured in Norway after years of waiting for the right conditions. He hiked to a location on Senja Island, set up his tent, and on his last attempt, the Northern Lights erupted across the sky for a perfect half hour. That's the thing about panoramic photography — it rewards patience and precision. You can't just point and shoot. You have to think about composition across 360 degrees, rotate carefully, manage exposure across multiple frames. The best ones feel like they took forever to capture, which in a way, they did.
As the sun's activity cycle continues, expect even more aurora photographs to emerge. But what these awards show is that panoramic photography is becoming less about the technology and more about what it reveals — the scale of natural phenomena, the texture of human work, the moments that are too wide for any single frame.
