Panoramic 1st place winner

Out on the Sea, We’d Be Forgiven captures a singular, transcendent night where risk, revelation, and beauty blur the boundaries of time. This photograph documents a high-stakes bridge ascent during solar maximum—a moment when action, fate, and witness converge in the spirit of kairos, the opportune moment.

Shot freehand at dizzying heights, each image in the panorama transforms a precarious climb into a delicate dance between control and surrender. The bridge cables become tightropes suspended between earth and sky, while the aurora unfurls in luminous ribbons of emerald and violet over the Gulf of Maine.

This series explores the relationship between physical risk and transcendence. The ascent becomes an act of striving toward something beyond the self, a momentary escape where the sea below mirrors the sky above. In that fleeting space, gravity loosens its hold, light becomes liquid, and we are briefly absolved—reminded that in the raw, pulsing now, we are both daring and free.

Iris Yaun is a photographer and experimental image-maker whose work fuses technical mastery with an almost mythic pursuit of the ephemeral. A decade behind the lens has sharpened her sense of kairos—the perfect intersection of moment and witness—whether capturing the night sky’s slow-breathing vastness or lugging a camera up the perilous heights of a bridge tower to frame an aurora’s electric fugue. Her imagery, sculpted through panoramic techniques and meticulous post-processing, does not merely document but transfigures; the viewfinder becomes a threshold where perception, memory, and light collapse into singularity. Climbing bridges beneath solar storms, navigating the liminal edges of vision and experience, she sees photography as more than a craft—it is an invocation, a means of revealing the unseen and mapping the ineffable.