Introduction

In this show’s earlier history I regularly used Apple’s photo competitions as inspirations for episodes. In March 2019 Jeff Carlson joined me on LTP 67 to critique the winners of Apple’s ‘Shot on iPhone’ competition to see what lessons we could take from them. The following year in March 2020 Jeff Gamet joined me on LTP 78 to critique the winners of the next year’s ‘Shot on iPhone’ competition. Apple had released their Night Mode the previous September, so the competition specifically asked users to submit night shots. Again, we tried to distill some lessons from the winning shots. Jeff (Gamet) returned two years later for LTP 103, the spring after Apple had added the iPhone’s macro mode, and had asked users to submit their macro shots. That was the last time I featured an Apple Photography contest on the show.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the IPPAWARDS, an independent iPhone photography competition that’s been running as long as there have been iPhones! The winning shot was nothing sort of spectacular, so I thought it might be worth spending some time critiquing this year’s prize-winning shots to see what’s possible with modern iPhones.

The Rules

Before we look at the images, let’s take a moment to familiarise ourselves with the rules constraining the photographer’s work:

Entries are open worldwide to photographers using an iPhone or iPad. … The photos should not be altered in any desktop image processing program such as Photoshop. It is OK to use any IOS apps. The use of any iPhone is permissible. iPhone add-on lenses can be used.

The competition really has remained true to its original mission — it still showcases the best shots entirely created on iPhones.

BTW, while the rules allow iPads, none of the forty winners were shot on an iPad. I think that probably has more to do the iPad’s size and bulk than anything else. I don’t think it implies they don’t have capable cameras.

40 Prize Winning Images

There are forty images that have been chosen as winners, four are given medals, then there are first, section, and third place winners in the following 12 categories:

• Abstract
• Animals
• Architecture
• Children
• City Life/Cityscape
• Landscape
• Lifestyle
• Nature
• People
• Portrait
• Series
• Other

Unfortunately, following along will be a little more involved than I’d have liked, because the site doesn’t make it possible to link directly to specific winning shot 🙁

The button below will take you to the gallery view, showing all the winning shots as a grid of clickable thumbnails labeled by their prize, and there’s a menu across the top to move between the categories.

Winners Gallery

I’ll refer to each shot I call out by the prize it won.

Before zooming out and bit and looking at some general patterns in the forty winning images, I want give the four medal winners their due attention.

The Medal Winners

The Grand Prix went to a simply stunning night show of an erupting volcano in front of a start scape. The colours are stunning, and the number of stars captured is genuinely impressive. What makes it even more impressive is that it was shot on a two-year-old iPhone 15 Pro Max with just a 1 second exposure!

The Gold Medal went to a very different shot — a monochrome shot looking down on kids sleeping on a sunny lawn with a badminton shuttle cock next to them, and the shadow of a racket cast onto them. Were it not for the fact that the shuttlecock is artificial rather than made of feathers, it looks utterly timeless. What this shot really emphasises is how long phone cameras have been capable of creating world-class images, this was shot on an iPhone X, a model that’s now nine years old!

The Silver Medal went to another monochrome shot, this one edited to drive the contrast right up. We see a black cat standing at the edge of a square black opening in a white wall, with two bright eyes grabbing your attention instantly. The shot has been edited to push both the opening and the cat’s body to pure black, and the wall to pure white, so the cat half-vanishes into the opening, except for that second eye! The description doesn’t say which app it was edited in, but the standard Photos app can definitely achieve this effect. This was shot on a one-year-old iPhone 16 Pro.

The Bronze Medal went to a vibrant still life showing a colourful parrot perched on red and greed watermelon segments on a table in front of some kind of cloud-like background. This is clearly a skilfully assembled studio shot with professional lighting, but the quality is every bit as good at something shot with a studio camera. This is not my style of photography, so it doesn’t really speak to me, but I can appreciate it’s obvious very high quality! Like the silver winner, this was shot on a one-year-old iPhone 16 Pro, thought it was the Max model.

It’s truly noteworthy that none of the overall winning shots are from the most current phone model. You don’t need the latest and greatest phone to take truly world-class shots!

The Forty Prizewinning Shots

Scrolling up and down through the full set of the 40 winners, a few things immediately catch my eye.

There are a Lot of Monochrome Shots

As well as half of the medal winners being monochrome, 14 of the 40 winners are actually monochrome, which is a little over a third! Again, like within the winners, there’s lots of variety in the choices the photographers made when doing their monochrome versions.

We’ve already seen the gold medal winner using a timeless traditional monochrome look, and the silver medal winner choosing an extremely contrasty low-key look, but there’s lot of other choices represented.

The first place shot in the children category is probably the most eye-catching monochrome, at least to me. What really makes it sing is how alive it feels — we see a little girl running up a beach with a bucket in hand looking back at big waves breaking over rocks behind her, she’s brightly list with a very big expression on her face, and the sand and the rocks have been rendered in very dark tones, adding a lot of contrast without losing detail. This is a real action shot, with the phone having frozen the action perfectly. There’s not a hint of motion blur in the breaking waves!

The days when shutter lag and longer exposure times made this kind of shot impossible are clearly long gone!

The first place image in the other category is another contrasty monochrome, but this one is shot straight into the sun. We see the silhouette of a person in a public beach shower be splashed with bright white water as the sun above shines through wispy fine-grained high clouds.

This really shows off how well iPhones handle shooting into the sun. It’s so difficult to get this kind of shot with a DSLR!

Another notable back-lit monochrome is the third place in the other category. In this case we have outside light streaming in through background windows into the ruined interior of once fancy building, shining through an ornate curving staircase and into puddles on the floor which are partially reflecting the whole scene. There is a light mist hanging in the air, and the back-light picks it out perfectly. The balancing of that difficult backlighting is simply stunning, and the effect is very powerful. As you would expect from a back-lit shot, this one is also very contrasty, with white whites and inky black blacks.

In contrast to that, the third place portrait has extremely even tones, perfectly balanced about the entire contrast range, all without the image feeling flat or boring. There’s so much wonderful detail here in this shot of an old man in some kind of office with an array of analogue clocks behind him, paging through some kind of very big ledger.

Finally, there is the second place landscape — this has a very clear ¾ full Moon in an inky black sky next to a well lit rock formation. This is almost certainly a daytime shot converted to monochrome using a channel mixer, with the blues being turned right down, and probably the reds right up for balance. The effect is very powerful, and any great astronomical shot is always going to catch my eye 🙂

This shot is notable in being the first one I’ve called out shot with the new 8x telephoto.

Focal Lengths?

By far the majority of the 40 winning shots are taken as 1x or 2x, but there are 11 taken at 3x, 5x, or 8x.

Given how new the 8x telephoto is, and how much it impressed me, I paid special attenion to the three shots taken with that lens.

As well as the wonderful monochrome Moon shot I just described, there first place shot in the city life/cityscape category is also shot with the 8x telephoto, but it doesn’t scream ‘telephoto shot’ at first glance, being a sky-dominated shot with layers of clouds, a silhouetted flock of birds and some kind of industrial skyline dominated by a tall smokestack with a very white cloud streaming out of it. This is yet another monochrome too!

The birds are physically small in the shot, but they add a lot to it, and I don’t think they could have been captured with a shorter lens. The more I look at the shot the more I realised that the layering is relying heavily on the telephoto compression effect, so this shot really would not have worked without that big (for a phone) zoom.

The third 8x telephoto shot is the third place shot in the animal category, and this one is classic telephoto-fodder, showing a flock of pink flamingos reflected in dark inky black water. The colour and the contrast are both great, showing this lens’s quality.

The 5x telephoto lens on the other hand really disappointed me, so I was surprised to see one of the prize winners did use it — the third place series is shot with that lens, but it really doesn’t speak to me. It’s a series of three tightly cropped upward views of a tightly packed huddle of seagulls, rendered as quite a dark monochrome. It may just be a taste thing, bit I don’t get this image.

I’m sure you’re all sick of hearing me wax lyrical about my love of the 0.5x wide angle lens, but alas it literally features just once in the forty prize winners! It is a great image though, and one we’ve already discovered, the contrasty back-lit shower image shot straight into the sun!

Night Mode is Used Sparingly, But Very Effectively

Given the fact that the grand prix winner is a night-mode shot, you might thing night mode is used heavily, but it’s not. There are just three shots that I think used the mode in the forty winners, but all three are extremely effective.

After the grand prix winner, the next most effective one in my opinion is the first place architecture category winner. It’s a very pleasing elevated view of a curving lit driveway winding towards a modern looking home set into a hillside. The balance between the remaining natural light and the artificial light is wonderful, and the colours all feel natural to boot. What this shot really illustrates for me is how amazingly well Apple’s phones can handle mixed light. Taking this kind of shot with an SLR is extremely difficult, but the iPhone takes it in it’s stride!

The third night mode shot is not quite my kind of shot, but it’s clearly an excellent photo. It’s the third place in the city life/cityscape category, and very much focuses on the category’s life aspect. We see kids playing basket ball late at night on a poorly lit urban court, despite the inky black blacks emphasising the time of day, there is plenty of natural looking light and colour in the scene to really bring it to life.

Colour is Very Fungible

We’ve already seen amazingly natural colour in the grand prix winner, and somewhat emphasised colour in the Bronze winner, but there are quite a few other colour choices photographers have made — the iPhone really is very versatile when it comes to how it can capture colour!

I’m naturally drawn to strong vibrant colours that still look real, in that they are not distorted, just emphasised. Given my tastes, there are a few shots that really catch my eye.

Probably the most vibrant of all the colours is the second place abstract. Appropriately enough, given the category, I’m not really sure what we’re looking at, but what we get is a mixture of wonderfully interesting shapes dominated by strong bright yellows, and rich deep reds.

Some what similar, but a little less abstract is the second place city life/cityscape photo. This one shows some fascinating architectural shapes, with the different parts of the building having very different colours.

The scene is dominated by a big sun-lit wall that’s a vibrant white on top, and rich saturated orange on the bottom. A single rectangular window shows the vibrant blue sky behind, and a white diagonal lines outlines a staircase. A single figure adds some life to the scene, being half way down the staircase.

I can’t but mention the shockingly vibrant and un usual shade of purple in the third place shot of children, it’s an elevated view looking down on a classroom with both the girls and boys in a dark room, but all wearing these very vibrantly coloured uniforms. The contrast between the dark tones and the vibrant colour instantly grab the eye!

Some of the photographers chose to distort the colours for photographic effect, most notably the first place landscape. It shows a winding path disappearing into the distance in a hilly scrub landscape with a clear sky above. The scrub is rendered as an unnatural shade of orange, and the sky has a teal green tone. It clearly impressed the judges, but it’s pretty much the inverse of my style!

Most of the photos keep their colour more natural, and most emphasise it a little, but not subtly so. Two photographers chose to take the opposite approach though. The third place nature shot is obviously subtly de-saturated, showing a red poppy against a blue sky, and yet neither of those very strong colours dominate the shot. The third place shot of people takes this effect a little further, with very muted colours on a shot of an elderly man pushing a child in some kind of stroller through what looks like a tall corn field.

A Lot of Powerful Textures

Quite a few of the winners depend to a greater or lesser degree on well captured textures. Most don’t focus on the texture, but without it they would have much less impact.

My favourite example of subtle but vital texture is the third place architecture shot, showing a white mosque through a very intricately shaped Arabian window in a sand-coloured foreground wall.

The shapes are amazing, but the white mosque holds the attention because of the delicate detail it’s stonework, a the iPhone has captured it perfectly.

The most obviously texture-forward shot is the first place abstract. It’s a stunning view of intricately detailed ice crystals on a car windshield. I’m probably also drawn to this image by the strong but natural colours, and the nice contrast between the blue-tined white frost, and the bright red car hood. The fact that this was shot with a nine-year-old iPhone 8 Plus is also very noteworthy.

Some Random Thoughts

I’ve scrolled up and down this list many times preparing for this segment, and there are two other images I really want to mention that I haven’t been able to draw in to the flow of the episodes narrative, so I’m just going to mention them here at the end.

The first is the first place nature shot — a wonderfully dreamy shot of a frosty bare tree appearing through gently parting mist over water. It’s just so wonderfully otherworldly!

And finally, I really want to talk about the second place series — I’m a big fan of overriding the iPhone’s preference for trying to get everything well exposed and nudging the exposure down to produce a silhouette. Here we see three very similar but subtly different silhouettes of people crossing a bridge between two tightly-spaced buildings with Chinese detailing against an orange sky. The images have a strange otherworldly feel because they seems to ripple slightly, and that’s because they are reflections in the water under the bridge!

Final Thoughts

Having originally been deeply sceptical about using phones for serious photography, I came to understand just how wrong I was many years ago. Scrolling through this series I feel completely vindicated — these shots are not just great camera phone shots, but great photographs!

A powerful image is a powerful image, regardless of any kind of consideration of the tools used to create it — you can show these images to anyone and describe them as generic photo contest winners, and everyone would agree they are simply amazing photos.

To underline the fact that camera phone have been very capable cameras for a long time now, it’s really striking how many of the winners are shot on older phones, some even on very old phones!

This kind of big gallery view really underlines how flexible a tool a modern iPhone is. These images span such a broad stylistic gamut, and yet they were all taken and proceed on iPhones!

I hope you’re as inspired as I am to go out there and keep shooting great shots with the camera you have with you 🙂