Skip to main content

The winning photographs from the 2018 Drone Awards will make you drool

“Above the Polar Bear” Winner: Photo of the Year Florian Ledoux

Drone photography has really taken off over the past few years, propelled in part by cheaper and more accessible technology. You can now buy a good consumer unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for just a couple hundreds bucks, or drop a few hundred more for one of the best on the market. Some may complain about the hum of UAVs hovering overhead but there’s one thing we can all agree on — the quality (and quantity) of aerial photography has reached new heights.

Case in point: The 2018 Drone Awards, which showcases some of the best aerial photography around. From scenes depicting the perils of climate change to abstract art and images of our built environment, more than 4,400 submissions from 101 countries were made to the Drone Awards. Now, seven have been selected as winners. Categories include urban, wildlife, sport, people, nature, abstract, and an overall photo of the year.

The photo of the year winner went to a nature image captured by French photographer Florian Ledoux. (You might recognize Ledoux’s photo as the winner of Skypixel’s photo contest earlier this year.) Titled Above the Polar Bear, the photo shows an almost golden polar bear crossing over ice blue water. Ledoux snapped the photo in Nunavut, Canada, while working on a report about wildlife in the area. He used a Phantom 4 Pro.

“I have witnessed incredible moments and scenes of the wild but I can guarantee you that this, by far, is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen,” Ledoux said at the time. “I hope that future generations will still be able to witness the beauty and grandeur of the Arctic wildlife the same way we do today.”

The best abstract photo was awarded to Ovi D. Pop’s Weather Snake, a striking image that contrasts a winding road through a dense forest during different seasons.

In the nature category, Gabriel Scanu’s winning image, Mada’in Saleh, depicts the legendary archeological site at such a distance to make it appear like a sand castle.

The urban category winner is Francesco Cattuto’s Assisi Over the Clouds, an otherworldly image of the Italian town seeming to jut out like a peninsula amid a sea of clouds.

The 2018 Drone Awards is a new initiative by the nonprofit Art Photo Travel Association, designed to highlight amateur and professional photographers alike.

Can’t get enough of these aerial images? Click here to see all the contest winners and notable submissions. And check out our gallery of the best drone photos.

Editors' Recommendations

Dyllan Furness
Dyllan Furness is a freelance writer from Florida. He covers strange science and emerging tech for Digital Trends, focusing…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more