Every year, the 1839 Awards drop a glittering little bomb on the photography world: a new set of color
photography winners that make the rest of us look at our phone gallery and quietly hit “delete.” The
Bored Panda feature on the “25 stunning color photography winners from the 1839 Awards” is basically a
highlight reel of the contest’s most jaw-dropping imagesshots where every hue, shadow, and reflection
feels like it was placed with tweezers instead of light.
If you love bold, expressive color photography, these photos aren’t just pretty to scroll past. They’re
a masterclass in how today’s best photographers are using color storytelling, composition, and concept
to stand out in a crowded visual world. Let’s dive into what makes these 25 winning images so special,
what the 1839 Awards are all about, and how you can steal (ahem, respectfully learn from) their
techniques for your own work.
What Are the 1839 Awards, Anyway?
The 1839 Awards are an international photography competition named after the year photography was
publicly introduced to the world. The organizers focus on fine art photography and run several annual
contests, including Photographer of the Year, an Art of Storytelling contest, and the Color Photography
Contest that gave us these 25 stunners. The goal: highlight photographers who use imagery not just to
document reality, but to shape it into art through light, color, and narrative.
The color photography contest typically includes professional and non-professional categories, with
winners selected across different genres like portrait, landscape, minimalism, architecture, travel,
and conceptual work. These winners don’t just get a digital pat on the backthey receive global
exposure through galleries, press coverage, social media promotion, and features on major photography
and culture sites. It’s the kind of visibility that can launch new careers or solidify existing ones.
Why Bored Panda Loves the 25 Color Winners
Bored Panda has a long tradition of spotlighting visually striking, story-driven photography, and the
1839 Awards color winners hit all their favorite notes: emotional moments, surreal compositions,
surprising color palettes, and scenes from all over the globe. Their feature on the 25 color winners
reads like a curated world tour through Morocco’s warm, sun-washed alleys, Mongolia’s sweeping
landscapes, American deserts, European city streets, and intimate portraits that could hang in a
museum.
What makes this collection stand out is that it’s not just “colorful for the sake of color.” The best
images use color as a structural element. A single crimson coat pulls your eye through an otherwise
muted frame. Turquoise and gold clash in a way that turns a small moment into a cinematic scene. Soft,
pastel skies make a lonely building feel like part of a dream rather than regular real estate. Each
winning photo feels like it was designed to be remembered.
The Stories Behind Some Standout Winning Images
1. Childhood Freedom in “Unsupervised”
One of the recent professional winners, a series titled “Unsupervised” by Alexandrena Parker,
shows kids playing freely outdoorsrunning, climbing, and exploring without adults hovering nearby.
The warm, dusty colors of outback Australia are more than a backdrop; they become part of the story of
nostalgia, independence, and the kind of childhood that’s getting rarer in the digital era. The golden
light and earthy tones make the images feel timeless, like memories you’re certain you had, even if
you grew up nowhere near the outback.
From an artistic point of view, the color work here is genius. Parker leans into soft, sun-soaked
palettes that bridge past and present, so the images feel both documentary and dreamlike at the same
time. It’s the kind of color photography that doesn’t yell; it hums, then sticks with you all day.
2. Tiger, Texture, and Tension
Another celebrated winner, “Tiger” by Sofia Lopez Mañan, is a portrait that balances danger and calm in
a single frame. A tiger’s orange coat practically vibrates against its surroundings, and the contrast
between the animal’s raw power and the photograph’s careful composition creates serious visual
tension. The color here isn’t just prettyit’s psychological.
Many of the 25 Bored Panda–featured winners use this same trick: complementary or high-contrast colors
that speak to the emotional tone of the image. Cool blues and warm oranges, dusty pinks and deep
midnight shadowsthese aren’t random choices. They’re part of a visual language that tells you how to
feel before you’ve even processed what you’re looking at.
3. Landscapes That Look Like Paintings
Several winning images turn natural landscapes into what looks like abstract painting. Aerial
photographs of rivers, beaches, and salt flats swirl with blues, whites, and golds, creating patterns
that are both real and strangely unreal. From high above, currents and coastlines resemble brushstrokes
on a canvas rather than bodies of water or stretches of land.
Other photos show deserts, mountains, or far-off plains bathed in pastel or neon light, with small
human figures or structures anchoring the frame. That tiny human presence gives scale and emotion to
what would otherwise just be a pretty postcard. The color choicesmuted peach skies, dusty teal
shadows, pale lavender highlightsturn the images into visual metaphors about isolation, resilience,
or quiet joy.
How the 1839 Awards Push Color Photography Forward
What’s fascinating about the 1839 Awards color contest is how many styles it embraces at once. Some
winners are pure fine artlayered, surreal, and conceptual. Others are grounded in the real world:
documentary shots from the streets, portraits of everyday people, or fleeting nature moments that
required patience and luck.
Across that variety, a few big themes stand out:
- Concept first, color second. Almost every winning image is built around an idea:
childhood freedom, climate anxiety, cultural heritage, migration, identity, or human connection.
Color supports the story instead of replacing it. - Global perspectives. The contest regularly draws entries from dozens of countries,
with winners representing wildly different environments and cultural contexts. That diversity shows
up in clothing, architecture, light quality, and even how color is used symbolically. - Fine control of the palette. Many winning shots avoid the “everything is saturated”
trap. Instead of cranking every slider to eleven, photographers often limit themselves to two or
three dominant tones that stay consistent across a series. - Film and digital side by side. While digital dominates, some winners lean into film
aestheticsgrain, subtle color shifts, and a softer dynamic rangeto bring a handmade feel into the
work.
Lessons Photographers Can Steal from the 25 Color Winners
You might not be submitting to the 1839 Awards this year (yet), but the 25 winning color photos that
Bored Panda highlights are packed with usable ideas. Here are some of the most practical takeaways for
anyone holding a cameraor even a smartphone.
1. Treat Color Like a Character
In the best winning images, color behaves like a supporting actor in the story. Ask yourself:
What role does this color play? Is the red coat in your frame meant to signal danger, romance,
or simply lead the viewer’s eye? Are those pastel tones meant to feel nostalgic, or slightly unreal?
Before you press the shutter, try to identify one or two “hero colors” in the scene and compose around
them. Once you start thinking this way, even ordinary locationsa bus stop, a laundromat, a quiet
street cornerstart to look like ready-made sets.
2. Embrace Imperfect Environments
A lot of the winning photos weren’t shot in pristine locations. Some show industrial landscapes,
cluttered interiors, or crowded city streets. Instead of hiding those elements, the photographers use
color and composition to find beauty in the chaos.
That’s good news if you don’t live next to a breathtaking canyon or postcard-ready village. Look for
unexpected pockets of colora neon sign reflected in a puddle, the way sunset light hits a parking
garage, the soft glow of a convenience store at night. Great color is often hiding in unglamorous
places.
3. Build a Series, Not Just a Single Photo
Many of the most celebrated winners from the 1839 Awards are series, not standalone images. The judges
clearly love coherent visual storytelling: a set of images with a consistent palette, theme, and
emotional arc.
If you’re shooting with contests or portfolio building in mind, think in sequences. Can you tell a
story about your neighborhood using only images shot at blue hour? Can you photograph one subjectsay,
your grandmother, a local market, or a riverthrough four different seasons, all with the same subtle
color language?
4. Use Color to Navigate an AI-Heavy World
With AI-generated images floating everywhere, color photography that feels grounded and human stands
out even more. Many of the 1839 Awards winners lean into textures, imperfections, and small, messy
details: the way fabric wrinkles, how skin tones shift with light, or how dust and haze hang in the
air.
Authentic color doesn’t have to be flawless. Slightly off-kilter hues, mismatched lights, or unusual
combinations can actually make a photo feel more real and emotionally interesting than a perfectly
polished, synthetic-looking image.
How to Enjoy the 25 Color Winners Like a Pro
Even if you never plan to enter a photo contest, there’s a lot of joy (and learning) in slow-looking
at these 25 images. Here’s a fun way to “study” them without turning it into homework:
- Do a no-scroll pass. Look at each image and pause for a few seconds before reading
the caption. Ask yourself how it makes you feel and which parts of the frame your eyes land on
first. - Notice the palette. Is the photo mostly warm or cool? Are the colors bright,
muted, pastel, or deep? Does one color clearly dominate? - Find the color story. Imagine each image had a title based only on the colors:
“Three Shades of Rust,” “Electric Blue Night,” “Dusty Pink Morning.” Often, what you come up with
will line up with the actual mood of the series. - Steal one idea. For each winning image, pick one thing you could copy in your own
work: a framing choice, a color pairing, a use of reflection, or the way the subject sits in the
frame.
By the time you’ve worked through all 25, you’ve basically given yourself a mini-masterclass in modern
color photographyno tuition required.
of Real-World Experience: Living with the 1839 Color Winners in Your Head
Here’s the thing about looking at a collection like “25 Stunning Color Photography Winners From the
1839 Awards”: once you’ve really absorbed those images, they don’t stay on your screen. They move into
your everyday life and start whispering suggestions every time you see light hit a wall in an
interesting way.
Imagine you’ve just spent twenty minutes scrolling through those winners. You close the tab, step
outside, and suddenly your own neighborhood feels upgraded. That graffitied alley that used to look
like a shortcut you shouldn’t take? Now it looks like a potential backdroplayers of chipped paint and
spray-can color waiting for a subject in a simple, contrasting outfit. That bland beige apartment
block? With the right morning light, it’s practically a minimalist sculpture.
This is one of the underrated “side effects” of following contests like the 1839 Awards: your eyes get
trained. You start noticing how a red umbrella pops against a gray sky, how car taillights streak in
the rain, or how the reflection in a bus window creates an accidental double exposure. You may never
submit anything, but you carry yourself like someone who might, and that changes how you see the
world.
A fun way to turn that inspiration into action is to set yourself a “micro-assignment” inspired by the
winners. Maybe you loved a series that used pale blues and soft pinks to create a dreamlike mood.
Challenge yourself to shoot only in those colors for a weekend. Or maybe you were drawn to the bold
oranges and deep shadows in one of the desert landscapes. Try finding an urban equivalentan orange
building at golden hour, a sodium streetlamp at night, even a brightly painted food truck in a parking
lot.
You can also bring friends or family into the experiment. Show them three of your favorite winning
images and ask what emotions they feel just from the colors alone. Hopeful? Lonely? Calm? Creeped out
in a good, artsy way? Then try to recreate that feeling in a totally different setting. You’re not
copying the shot; you’re borrowing its emotional color recipe and remixing it.
Over time, you may notice something else: your patience grows. Many of the 1839 Awards color winners
required waitingfor the right cloud, the right person to walk into the frame, the right tide or
season or slant of light. When you start looking at the world like a color photographer, you learn to
hang around an extra few minutes in a spot that “might” become interesting. You learn to revisit the
same places at different times of day. You realize that great color often isn’t about having the
fanciest gear, but about showing up when everyone else has already gone home.
And maybe the best part? Even if you never win a prize or land in a Bored Panda feature, the process
of actually seeing color this intensely makes daily life richer. Your commute becomes a moving gallery
of light. A grocery store aisle turns into a study in complementary colors. A rainy afternoon becomes
an excuse to hunt for reflections in puddles instead of complaining about the weather.
That’s the real magic hiding behind those 25 stunning color photography winners from the 1839 Awards:
they don’t just decorate a page. They recalibrate your vision, so that when you put the camera or the
phone down, the world itself starts to look a little more like art.
Conclusion: Turning Inspiration into Your Own Color Story
The 1839 Awards Color Photography Contest and the Bored Panda feature showcasing 25 of its standout
winners prove that color photography is very much alive, evolving, and wildly creative. These images
aren’t just technically impressivethey’re emotionally sharp, conceptually rich, and globally diverse.
Whether you’re a serious photographer, a casual creator, or a dedicated “I mostly just take pictures of
my cat” person, spending time with these winners can transform how you see light, composition, and
color in your own life. Learn from their limited palettes, strong concepts, and patient storytelling,
then step outside and start building your own body of workone vivid, intentional frame at a time.
