2022 Panoramic Photography Contest Study and Appreciation — A Young Chinese Photographer Wins a Major Award!

The Pano Awards is a landscape photography contest focused on "panoramic" compositions with aspect ratios above 2:1. The winning works are wonderful every year, and I've been reporting on and appreciating them with everyone since 2019.

This year's Grand Prize photographer is young Chinese photographer He Jinyi, and all the locations are in Xinjiang, China!

In today's photography tutorial, I'll also appreciate this year's winning works with everyone, learning their composition and color grading together~

Video

▶ Watch the video tutorial on Bilibili

This is the fully illustrated companion to the video above. The Pano Awards is a photography competition devoted to panoramic compositions wider than 2:1, and Thomas has covered it every year since 2019. In 2022 the Photographer of the Year title went to He Jinyi, a young Chinese photographer whose winning images were all made in Xinjiang, China. Screenshots of the winners throughout — let's study their composition and grading together.

Start with the overview: the contest's 2022 Winners Gallery on the official website. The full set is worth browsing and studying at the Epson Pano Awards site (at 9:43 in the video).

01 A Chinese Photographer Takes the Top Prize

This year's Photographer of the Year is He Jinyi (at 0:50 in the video), and it is heartening to see more and more young Chinese photographers making their mark on the international stage. What makes it even better: his winning works were all shot in China, in Xinjiang above all — not just a Chinese photographer, but Chinese landscapes.

The Dushanzi Grand Canyon image (at 1:22 in the video) rewards a close look: most photographers who visit simply crop its textures with a telephoto lens or take a quick drone shot, but He Jinyi devised a far more ingenious approach — a top-down aerial panorama stitched not by rotating the camera but by flying the drone in a flat, translating pattern, assembling an immense frame that conveys a truly vast landscape. His Tianshan Grand Canyon (at 2:05 in the video) catches a spectacular, complete rainbow arching over the gorge behind it.

02 A Panorama Is Not Everything Poured In

This competition is not restricted to stitched panoramas; it accepts any composition wider than 2:1 (at 2:23 in the video), a format that suits grand landscapes beautifully. But a common misconception says a broad scene demands a stitched panorama — ideally a 360 — sweeping everything in. The crucial skill in panoramic photography is precisely knowing what to include and what to leave out: from such a sweeping viewpoint, chaos is the default failure mode.

Look at He Jinyi's images (at 3:06 in the video): they are full of repeated structures — grasslands, blossoms, the canyon's rock spires — and that repetition creates an ordered beauty that keeps the frame from dissolving into clutter. All too often a panorama takes in a city on the left, farmland on the right, a mountain in front and water behind, unrelated subjects crammed together, and the picture falls apart into noise.

03 Low Light and Broad Tonal Layers

He Jinyi's chosen moments all fall in what we call low light (at 3:51 in the video). The virtue of low light is that most of the frame sits in shadow, untouched by direct sun — in the grassland photo, most of the grass below is unlit, with further darkening applied in post. Raise the sun just a little, every weed lights up, and the photograph collapses into visual chaos.

The Urban category winners are equally instructive (at 4:24 in the video): we tend to imagine panoramas as horizontal sweeps, but this photographer stitched vertically, straight up into a cathedral's dome — many cathedrals carry frescoes and ornament across their ceilings, and a vertical panorama reveals precisely the most precious part. Better yet, because you photograph the cathedral as one complete structure, its light and color were designed to be unified from the start, so clutter never appears.

Now the mountain groups (at 5:13 in the video): backlight, sidelight — front light works too — but the core is attending to broad tonal layers. You do not need abundant detail. Many photographers hoist the shadows sky-high, anxious that the outline of every tree, every pothole and path go unseen; yet in a panoramic composition, once those textures multiply the frame scatters, and showing only the broad layers is actually the stronger result. Panoramic photography is, at heart, the art of sacrifice: keep the layers, drop the details.

04 Abstract Textures and Subtraction

A step further is abstraction (at 6:16 in the video): seek out geometric textures, sweeping color fields, and striking lines. When shooting salt lakes, people fear missing something and try to fit a dozen pools into one frame; the ideal shot may be a small section of a single pool — the abstract texture that results is the most captivating of all.

Panoramic work leans on repetition — and always demands subtraction (at 6:50 in the video). In one image, the photographer used fog plus further shaping in post to subtract tonal detail from the background: no tangled branches to see, because the fog acts as a backdrop. And clear blue skies are not automatically best for panoramas — they simply carry too much detail. A frame needs both addition and subtraction to guide the eye well.

Even the grandest landscape has a simple skeleton (at 7:29 in the video): that seemingly complex glacier photograph is at heart the endless repetition of glacial texture, dotted with a few ice lakes and peaks — far simpler in structure than it looks. Across a great many panoramas wider than 2:1, the pattern holds: add through repetition, subtract with restraint. That balance is the decisive factor.

05 Contrast, Echo and the Urban Set

Within repetition, contrast can appear (at 8:22 in the video): a lone tree rising in the foreground against the scene behind it; clouds set off against a forest. Contrast and echo are staples of panoramic photography — the city in front is a highly unified geometric structure, a snow mountain stands behind, and together the two form a larger contrast still (at 8:41 in the video). Take away the small chapel in another image and the charm would drain away.

In the Urban set (at 9:00 in the video), notice the luminosity-architecture light and shadow built in post, and the cleanup of tangled traffic on the streets — a good time of day chosen up front, meticulous processing after. There is also a telephoto-compressed building that resolves into exactly three faces (at 9:20 in the video), easy enough to attempt in high-rise cities like Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chongqing or Chengdu; another frame uses an impeccably clean surrounding to set off its subject (at 9:31 in the video). These are superb panoramic photographs — browse this year's winners at the Epson Pano Awards website and learn from them.

1. The key to panorama is not sweeping everything in but knowing what to include and exclude, building ordered beauty from repeated structures. 2. Shoot in low light so most of the frame rests in shadow, then darken grass and clutter further in post. 3. For mountains and fog, think in broad layers — never hoist the shadows, and let mist serve as a natural backdrop. 4. Add through repetition while subtracting with restraint — abstract textures, bold color fields, contrast and echo are what lift a panorama.

HD video:

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1SV4y1572D/

Winning Works Excerpts