Upon first look at this award-winning image, you see a pair of children napping in the sun forming an aesthetic, symmetrical composition – but the deeper meaning, the backstory, remains illusive. However, look closer and the true mastery of the frame becomes clear.
After a moment, your eye flutters to the shuttle cock in the bottom-left corner, and the shadowy outline of a badminton racket reveals itself on the children’s faces. Although these elements are right in front of your eyes, it takes a second for them to come into focus, so to speak, and this is when the narrative finally becomes clear.
These children aren’t just napping in the sun, they’ve been playing an energetic game of badminton – and perhaps it’s their friend or family checking on them, racket in hand, that has revealed all. It’s not a monumental story, but the creative use of shadows and light makes sense of the scene, which to my eye has an abstract quality.
This is the work of Gellért Gombai, a commercial photographer from Hungary, which recently earned him the title of Photographer of the Year at the 2026 iPhone Photography Awards (IPPAwards).
The competition celebrates photos taken on Apple handsets, and Gellért used an iPhone X with camera settings of 4mm (28mm equivalent), 1/1500sec, f/1.8 and ISO20 to capture his shot.
Gellért’s image was selected from thousands of submissions across more than 140 nations, and I think what impressed the judges most was surely how he bent light and shadow to his will, using them to infuse layers into the brilliant black-and-white scene.
It's not the first time the photographer does this, either. His masterful approach to adding depth to abstract images has been developed over time, and is perfectly exemplified in this series depicting humans interacting with water, which he posted on Instagram.
Achieve the award-winning result on one of the best black-and-white cameras that use dedicated monochrome sensors in mirrorless bodies is one thing. But to get this tonality and look from an almost decade-old camera is a great feat – and worthy of the IPPAwards recognition.
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