/ 2025 / Nature / Trees

• Prize
  Honorable Mention
• Photographer
  Yukio Nodo, Japan
• Date of Photograph
  26th April 2025
• Website
  https://www.yukionodo.com/
• Instagram
  https://www.instagram.com/negiasatsuki/

In the early hours, the lake lay breathless, veiled in a hush of morning mist. Trees rose from the flooded landscape, their forms mirrored so perfectly that reflection and reality became indistinguishable. The rising sun filtered gently through the fog—not as a burst of light, but as a quiet exhale. Nothing moved, yet everything felt alive: the soft shimmer on water, the suspended silence, the warmth behind the cold. This was not a moment to be captured, but a moment to be entered—an invitation to stillness, to grace, to peace.

I am a Japan-based landscape and nightscape photographer. My work explores landscapes not simply as scenery, but as places shaped by the quiet interplay of light, time, and the broader rhythms of nature. I am drawn to moments where the movements of the Earth and the sky intersect with traces of human presence. Rather than seeking dramatic spectacle, I focus on subtle transitions: how light shifts and how time settles into the land. Photography, for me, is a way of tracing these invisible layers and preserving fleeting relationships between the Earth, the sky, and the places we inhabit.

Awards Travel Photographer of the Year (TPOTY) 2025
- Finalist, Best Single Images in a Portfolio (Landscape, Weather & Climate)

Tokyo International Foto Awards (TIFA) 2025
- Gold Winner, Editorial / Environmental - "White Wounds"
- Gold Winner, Nature / Trees - "Ephemeral Dialogues"
- Silver Winner, Nature / Astrophotography - "Rocks on Earth Dream of Stars"

Budapest International Foto Awards (BIFA) 2025
- Silver Winner, Nature / Astrophotography - "Arch of The Ancients"
- Bronze Winner, Nature / Astrophotography - "Where Time Sleeps"
- Bronze Winner, Architecture / Industrial - "White Wounds"

Prix de la Photographie Paris (PX3) 2025
- Bronze Winner, Nature / Water - "The Passage of Trials"
- Bronze Winner, Press / Nature & Environmental - "White Wounds"

Vixen 6th Starry Sky Photo Contest 2025
- Award of Excellence - "Orion Lands on the Snowy Peaks"