Travel Image of the Month Winners 2025

Many congratulations to our joint winners for January: Omar Shamma for Bull Racing in the Mekong Delta and to Sanjoy Sengupta for Craft Work, Muscat, Oman.

Our adjudicator this month, Glyn Paton, was most impressed by the standard of images submitted for January, it gave him a "good" headache.

Bull Racing, Mekong Delta: This image has power and dynamism.  To deconstruct the image; the background is largely spray, which gives the picture its atmosphere, but the bush, bottom right provides an anchor point, as does the solitary leaf, bottom left’ish.  The central pole with the flags is so important to this image.  The pole provides the fulcrum of the shot and the flags that dash of colour. The ropes lead our eyes down to the bulls and the man/jockey. The concentration and effort is etched on the man’s face, not to mention the bulls themselves straining through the water.  A wonderful picture.

Congratulations to Sanjoy Sengupta

There is so much precision in the positioning of almost everything in this image that it’s like a painting or a film set where the director of photography has precisely placed all the items. Starting on the left with the window and the lantern.  I’m not sure why you’d have a lantern there, but it fills a blank space perfectly, and then you have its reflection on the wall. Perfect! We then move to the mat on the wall and the craftsman’s head is placed right in the middle!  Moving down and back to the left the basket making reeds lead us into the craftsman, beautifully lit, with enough detail to see the reeds being made into baskets.  And the display of goods on the right hand side, bringing an effective stop to that side.  The colour palette is beautiful, with the green handles of the baskets just giving enough variety and tension.  Everything is so well positioned it’s almost like a still life. I would be happy to have this picture on my wall.

Glyn Paton, this month's adjudicator, observed:

What a story this image tells us. The open textbooks, with Arabic script, the wooden scratched and worn “desks”, the head wear, the out of focus children at the back. It really gives us an idea of what life in a Madrassa is like.  It is such a different world to our Western ideas of school, but the two boys at the front give a wonderful connection to us; humour. The boy’s cheeky smile and his friend sharing the joke, but looking down so as not to be part of his “cheekiness”.  Of course it’s that smile that makes the picture.  Brilliant.

Many congratulations to Jo Kearney.