/ 2026 / Nature / Other

• Prize
  Honorable Mention
• Photographer
  Kathleen Magner Rios, United States
• Date of Photograph
  November 4, 2025
• Instagram
  KMRartist_botanicals

I keep returning to this tree.

There is something in the shape of its leaves — that perfect, open fan — that asks me to slow down, to look again. I photographed it twice, in different light, and both times it gave me something different: once a quiet hovering green, cool and suspended; once a burning gold, alive with the early morning sun.

The ginkgo has outlasted almost everything. Standing beneath it with a camera, I find I am not trying to capture it so much as sit with it — to borrow, for a moment, its particular kind of stillness and ancient light.