Every time some of the more famous global photography awards are announced it’s a bit of a mini-Christmas for me. I immediately cease whatever activity I was involved in at the moment and slowly go through all the winning and shortlisted images, marvelling at these beautiful results that I dare not hope to ever come close to myself. Among my favourites so far are the World Press Photo Awards, the HIPA Awards, the Sony World Photography Awards, UK Landscape Photographer of the Year and the various competitions hosted by the National Geographic Society throughout the year.

Today I stumbled upon another competition called the Neutral Density Awards. Contrary to what the name implies no neutral density filter has to be involved in the making of any of the images, instead the awards “aim to promote photography and photographers. Their idea is to create new opportunities to present most valuable work to the audience all over the world. To build a place where photographers can show diverse points of view and thrive through competition.” (quote from the awards’ homepage). This year the judges went through 4,217 entries from 77 countries, and on the 27th of November announced Sandro Baebler from Switzerland as the overall winner in the professional category; meanwhile Lola Mitchell (United States) topped the non-professional category. I greatly enjoyed going through all the winning and shortlisted images, most of all because the quality was incredibly high, but also because in many cases the entries consisted of sets of several images instead of single frames, giving the photographers a better chance to tell a story and show a subject from several angles.

These are some of my favourite entries, you can have a look at all the other great images on the award’s website galleries.

All images are intellectual property of the respective photographer and were used with permission of the ND Awards.