Honorable Mention / 2020 / Special / Night Photography

Under the Milky Way Arc

This photo follows up on the free collection called „Spring‘s night sky in Czech“. It was created in my favorite location in Šumava (Bohemian Forest National Park), well-known for dark sky. Usually, fog is a dear friend for every landscape photographer. In this case, it became our enemy. Despite dry weather conditions, a thick fog appeared from nowhere and reached our positions. Nevertheless we got bit of luck and captured this wide-angle panorama.

Panorama compiled from total of 36 frames (21 averaged exposures of stars in one row, 15 averaged exposures of landscape

Jan Šmíd is exclusively a landscape photographer with a special focus on panoramic photography, For his work, he uses modern photography methods like exposure bracketing, antireflex, focus bracketing, parallactic mount, etc. He has been organizing photography workshops for seven years; he organizes photo expeditions and runs an Individual Photography School.

He is the author of the Photography Wine Harvest concept, where he combines photography in South Moravia and Tuscany together with explaining and tasting great wines.

Jan got the MASTER QEP certification in summer 2018.

Awards Jan has received more than 200 medals/awards from international photography contests. He values medals from Tokyo, Paris, Los Angeles, Moscow, London, Melbourne, Budapest, Vienna...