Photography Tutorial · 2021-12-12

Hasselblad Masters Results Are Out, and Two Chinese Photographers Won! Here's the Learning Analysis!

Thomas Chu Photo

Learning from winning photographers' work through photography competitions is an excellent way to study photography.

In the tutorial "About Photography Competitions: Here's the Most Detailed Beginner's Guide", Thomas recommended the Hasselblad Masters competition.

In today's video tutorial, Thomas will appreciate and learn from the 2021 Hasselblad Masters winning works together with everyone, including the photos of two Chinese photographers.

Video tutorial

▶ Watch the video tutorial on Bilibili

This is the illustrated companion to the video above. The 2021 Hasselblad Masters results are out, with two Chinese photographers — Shi Honghua and Wang Yihao — taking Landscape and Project//21. Thomas reads the winners' page row by row and pulls out two keywords, style and individuality, before closing on the boundary between post-processing and truth. All winning works appear in this article; the commentary follows below.

First, a striking pattern: scroll down the Masters website and each row is highly unified in tone, color, composition and subject, yet compared vertically every row looks like a different photographer entirely (at 1:05 in the video). Hence the first keyword — style.

Hasselblad Masters Results Are Out, and Two Chinese Photographers Won! Here's the Learning Analysis! · Fig. 1

01 Keyword One: Style

Style is far more than grading: it is forged from a photographer's long experience, chosen subjects, chosen hours and post-processing together. Fly the same Arctic aerial treatment over grassland and it stops working; slip a midday frame into that starlit architecture series and it clashes — style is bound to your weather and timing (at 2:33 in the video). It is also the rite of passage: in an age of image surplus, stylelessness is a knockoff phone; a formed style registers your brand in the photography world.

02 Keyword Two: Individuality

Nothing in the finals is technically weak; the jury picks whoever stands apart. The Arctic aerials won partly because few go there, and partly because the subject binds deeply to environmental concerns — pairing a less-visited destination with a contemporary issue makes you visible (at 4:21 in the video). The architecture laureate, meanwhile, lets buildings converse with stars and weather, staging the human-nature relationship.

Hasselblad Masters Results Are Out, and Two Chinese Photographers Won! Here's the Learning Analysis! · Fig. 2

Shi Honghua's Huangshan series is a textbook of stylization: every frame follows Chinese landscape-painting perspective — none of the wide-angle geometry of Western landscapes, everything compressed and stacked in layers, mist graded from near to far, even the aspect ratio echoing a scroll. To Western judges this painterly Chinese idiom is magnetic (at 5:19 in the video).

Hasselblad Masters Results Are Out, and Two Chinese Photographers Won! Here's the Learning Analysis! · Fig. 3

Hasselblad Masters Results Are Out, and Two Chinese Photographers Won! Here's the Learning Analysis! · Fig. 4

Project//21 winner Wang Yihao photographed a museum's interior: beyond superb brightness-mask lighting, the location itself is the triumph — most museum shots lean on repetition and symmetry, while this building mixes a flawless curve with crisp lines and bold color blocks, rare and arresting. The lesson: the subject is competitiveness itself — models, wardrobe and sets for people; places and issues for landscapes. No Arctic? Choose characterful nearby subjects, or stylize them through craft, as the Huangshan series did. The street winner took the other road: beautiful light plus coincidental decisive moments (at 6:35 and 8:11 in the video).

Hasselblad Masters Results Are Out, and Two Chinese Photographers Won! Here's the Learning Analysis! · Fig. 5

Hasselblad Masters Results Are Out, and Two Chinese Photographers Won! Here's the Learning Analysis! · Fig. 6

03 Style, Project by Project

Style accumulates slowly, but no rule forces every body of work into one mold — differentiate by project: Thomas's nature landscapes and his train-window series are two distinct styles. The Masters site lists every winner's name, socials and homepage, all worth deep study: Florian Ledoux shoots polar lands from Iceland to Antarctica; Germany's Albrecht Voss is a professional hotel-architecture photographer; and Shi Honghua's homepage pairs ink-style monochromes with moody color landscapes (at 9:47 and 10:09 in the video).

Hasselblad Masters Results Are Out, and Two Chinese Photographers Won! Here's the Learning Analysis! · Fig. 7

Hasselblad Masters Results Are Out, and Two Chinese Photographers Won! Here's the Learning Analysis! · Fig. 8

04 Post-Processing and Truth

Why post-process at all, some ask — because everywhere is reachable now, and countless lenses have met the polar bears and endangered species before yours; if anyone can shoot your exact frame, what makes it a work? The answer is the ideas you pour in. Wildlife winner Alice Zilberberg replaces backgrounds wholesale — still wildlife? Thomas says yes: the immaculate backdrops lend the animals the solemn dignity of portraiture, creatures equal to us in the frame — more moving than a random, cluttered, poorly graded snapshot of a rare animal (at 10:51 in the video).

Hasselblad Masters Results Are Out, and Two Chinese Photographers Won! Here's the Learning Analysis! · Fig. 9

1. Style is the sum of experience, subject, timing and post — find yours before chasing advancement; 2. Individuality is the angle others cannot offer: a less-visited place plus a contemporary issue, or a familiar subject presented in an unfamiliar way; 3. Digging into a winner's homepage teaches ten times more than the winning frames alone; 4. Post-processing never erases the fact of the capture — it amplifies your ideas and attitude, which is exactly where a photograph's value lives.