These 10 Award-Winning Drone Photos Bring Brilliant Photography to the Skies
The Siena Drone Photo Awards 2025 winners have been revealed, showcasing incredible aerial photography across a diverse range of subjects, from landscapes to wildlife and even people.
Alongside nine category winners, the Siena Awards selected an overall winner. This year’s Drone Photo Awards “Photo of the Year” winner is German photographer Dennis Schmelz, whose incredible image, “The Lone Horseman,” enthralled the judges.
Schmelz’s photo shows a lone rider at the top of a rocky outcropping in the heart of Cappadocia in Turkey. Schmelz captured this beautiful blue-hour photo on the first night of his winter trip to Cappadocia and used his drone to achieve a unique, dynamic perspective of the scene. The Siena Awards adds that “Dennis managed to find a unique and breathtaking perspective that had never been captured before in this often-photographed landscape.”
Category Winners
Alongside the overall winner, aerial photographers competed across eight categories, with a ninth dedicated to drone videography. The category winners from this year’s Siena Drone Photo Awards are featured below.
Urban
Photographer Mohammad Ataei Mohammadi’s photo, “Swallowed,” took top honors in the Urban category. The image shows the Artemia pleasure boat stranded on the dried lakebed of Lake Urmia in Iran. Following years of drought and poor water resource management, including agricultural overuse, the lake died, leaving behind relics of its watery past, like this boat.
Wildlife
Joanna Steidle’s remarkable photo, “Another World,” won the highly competitive Wildlife category. Steidle’s photo shows a top-down view of a fever of cow nose rays splitting a school of menhaden fish. The picture was taken just off the coast of Southampton, England, this past summer.
Sport
People are so used to seeing major sporting events from traditional, ground-level perspectives, but they make for great drone subjects. Shimon Perlstein’s photo, “Running on Salt,” shows a large group of runners at dawn running in the Dead Sea Marathon. Each year, runners from around the world arrive in the Dead Sea Basin to run races at “the lowest point on Earth.”
People
“Aarti Under the Stars” by Thibault Gerbaldi shows the Ganga Aarti ceremony at night. Each night in Varanasi, many people show up to participate in sacred rituals, and it is an almost otherworldly spectacle from the air.
Nature
The top prize in the Nature category went to Christopher Harrison for his photo, “The Long Shadow.” Harrison captured this shot on the first day of meteorological spring, as sunlight filtered through early-morning mist.
Abstract
Pawel Zygmunt’s first-place photo, “The Eye,” shows an unusual view of Hveravellir in Iceland. This geothermal pool looks like an animal’s eye from above, creating a striking optical illusion.
Wedding
Husband-and-wife photo and video team Oliver and Steph Prince captured this incredible shot of a newlywed couple atop a hill in the Isle of Skye in Scotland. It proved to be a beautiful, isolated location for an elopement.
Series
Dipanjan Pal’s series, “The Great Color Study: Vietnam,” won the Series category. The aerial photo series explores traditional professions in Vietnam, some of which have been passed down from generation to generation for over 500 years.
Video
Aerial videographer Fran Arnau’s video, “The Soul of Bangladesh,” takes viewers on a visually striking, emotionally powerful journey into Bangladesh, where people’s lives, work, and cultural history are all intricately connected.
More From the Siena Drone Photo Awards 2025
Alongside the overall winner and the nine category winners above, each category also includes runners-up and highly commended photos and videos. All the award-winners can be viewed on the Siena Drone Photo Awards website.
Image credits: Siena Drone Photo Awards 2025. All photographers are credited in the individual captions.
