The winning entries for the 2025 World Nature Photography Awards aren't just technically solid images of Earth's diverse fauna and landscapes. This time around, you'll find astonishingly beautiful compositions that tell dramatic tales and depict the incredible backdrops against which the lives of fascinating creatures on our planet play out.
This award, currently in its sixth year, recognizes some of the most impressive talent behind lenses from around the world. The 2025 award earned the winner a US$1,000 prize.
For 2025, the title of World Nature Photographer of the Year goes to Maruša Puhek from Slovenia. Her painting-like picture below shows a pair of deer breaking a canvas-wide pattern as they run through a snowy vineyard. It was part of her 366 project, in which she captured a photo every day for a year.
Jake Mosher from the US snapped up the gold in the Planet Earth’s landscapes and environments category with the image at the top of this article. His photo of the summer Milky Way reflected in Montana's Hyalite Lake was six years in the making.
"I wanted the sharp reflection, but until this past summer made the five-mile hike multiple times in vain – wind was my nemesis, shifting shoreline reeds and making alignment of the panorama impossible. Finally, in July 2023, I had 26 dead calm minutes and, running two cameras, captured the scene I'd imagined for a long time. I remained on scene all night and at dawn noticed a few obsidian shards near where I'd set up my cameras. I loved thinking that, for thousands of years, people have looked up at the night sky here with much the same wonder I feel today. I hope we never unravel all of our universe's mysteries," Mosher said.
I couldn't stop peering closely at all the details in Niki Colemont's gold winner in the Behavior - Invertebrates category. Colemont photographed the spoils of a spider hunting a robber fly in a garden over half an hour, and the image tells a story of nature taking its brutal course.
Dive into our gallery to see many more winning entries across categories, including Plants and fungi, People and nature, Underwater, Animal portraits, Black and white, and more.
Many of these photographs are also available for purchase as framed prints on the World Nature Photography Awards site – so if you like what you see, you can bring these beauties home to grace your walls.
And if you enjoyed these, don't miss last year's winners of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, stunning macros from the 2024 Close Up Photographer of the Year shortlist, and the prize-winning entries from the GDT's 2024 Nature Photographer of the Year competition. Oh, and don't miss the hilarious 2024 Comedy Wildlife Awards pictures either!
