Photography Beyond Borders 2019

 

Travel Photographer of the Year awards, proudly sponsored by Páramo Directional Clothing

Founded in 2003, and sponsored by Paràmo  since 2017, the annual Travel Photographer of the Year (TPOTY) competition attracts submissions from amateur, semi-professional and professional photographers from more than 140 countries. All are drawn to take the TPOTY challenge not only by the fantastic prizes on offer, but by the international kudos and exposure that comes from doing well in the awards.

Travel Photographer of the Year 2019 has a wide range of category themes and awards, reflecting the great diversity of travel photography. The winning photographer will be the entrant who submits the most stunning eight images, across four portfolio categories: ‘The Art of Travel’, ‘Endangered Planet’, ‘People & Cultures’ and ‘Thrills & Adventures’. There is also a special award for young photographers, and a category solely for images shot on a smartphone or tablet. New for this year is the TAPSA Travel Documentaries Award, for documentary photography with a travel-related theme.

Fantastic prizes include £5,000 in TPOTY cash bursaries, Fujifilm XT-3 cameras with 18-55mm lenses, Swarovski CL Companion 8×30 binoculars, a WILDFOOT Travel Northern Lights and Whale sailing ship expedition in Northern Norway, a 10-day trip to Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates and the Xposure Festival of Photography being held there (including a five-day photography workshop with the 2013 Travel Photographer of the Year, Timothy Allen), a TravelLight Secret Venice Immersive Photo Workshop with photographers’ Chris Weston and Simon Weir, a selection of Paràmo Directional Clothing, Plastic Sandwich leather portfolio books and iFolios, a full set of the stunning ‘Remembering Wildlife’ books, Photo Iconic mentoring and critiques, exhibition-quality prints from Genesis Imaging and Royal Photographic Society (RPS) memberships. Phew!

The awards are judged by an international panel of imaging experts, including double Pulitzer Prize-winner Essdras M Suarez, and Lawrence Jackson, a former official White House photographer under the Obama Administration. Winning images will be showcased in global media coverage and in the Travel Photographer of the Year exhibitions; in 2018 alone TPOTY exhibitions were seen by some two million people!

The 2019 categories are:

• The eight-image portfolio category: ‘The Art of Travel’
• The four-image portfolio categories: ‘Endangered Planet’, ‘People & Cultures’, ‘Thrills & Adventures’
• ‘TAPSA Travel Documentaries’ (the Timothy Allen Photography Scholarship Award)
• The One Shot single-image categories: ‘Dusk to Dawn’, ‘Ocean, Seas, Rivers, Lakes’, ‘Street Life’
• The SmartShot phone/tablet category: iTravelled
• Young Travel Photographer of the Year: My Journey

Images can be submitted online at tpoty.com or as prints. Entry fees start at £8 and submissions to the Young TPOTY are free of charge. Entries close on October 1st and the results will be announced in December. Watch this space…!