Aerial fishing net shot by Singapore photographer wins second place

Chin Leong Teo’s Dawn Net took second place in the Photographer of the Year category at the International Aerial Photographer of the Year 2026 awards, and the frame earns it. Shot off the coast of Vietnam, the image catches a cast fishing net suspended mid-flight over dark water, with the net’s sweep and the reflection below turning a working moment into a clean, graphic composition.

The picture works because Teo hit the split second between action and collapse. A moment earlier, the net would still have been in the fisherman’s hands; a moment later, it would have dropped into the water and lost that airborne shape. That tiny window is what gives the image its force, with altitude flattening the scene into pattern and the net’s pale arc standing out against the nearly black surface beneath it.

Teo made the frame with a DJI Mavic 3-series drone carrying a Hasselblad L2D-20c camera. The exposure was 1/640 second at f/2.8, ISO 100, with -1 exposure compensation, and the drone hovered at about 305 feet, or 93 meters. Those settings matter here because they kept the net crisp enough to read as a single sculptural form instead of a blur, while the slight underexposure helped preserve the dark water and push the tonal contrast.

The image landed in a field of 1,587 entries from around the world. Judges Tom Hegen, Isabella Tabacchi, and Joanna Steidle selected the top 101 photographs, and Teo’s frame stood out in a contest that organizers launched after the aerial work they were seeing started to surge. The competition grew out of the same appetite that had already powered the International Landscape Photographer of the Year awards, where organizers Peter Eastway and David Evans had spent years seeing more striking overhead work come through.

Teo brings a useful eye to that kind of scene. He began pursuing photography in 2013 and has built a reputation as an internationally published, multi-award-winning Singaporean photographer. He has studied in New York and California and has lived in Jakarta, Shanghai, and Dammam, a mix of places that shows up in the way he reads shape, distance, and moment from the air. In Dawn Net, that training comes down to one cast, one net, and one perfect instant before the water takes the frame back.