The Gate: What Won It All
DJI just dropped the winners for the 11th annual SkyPixel Photo and Video Contest. Nearly 95,000 entries from 96 countries, over $200K in prizes. The overall Best Photo winner is Filip Hrebenda’s “The Gate.” Shot with a Mavic 3 Pro in northern Norway during autumn 2025, it shows a natural stone arch with fog rolling through, a lone figure in red on top for scale. Mountains vanish into clouds behind. The composition is so tight it looks rendered, but it’s pure real-world capture.
Hrebenda called the location remote and brutally hard to reach. That effort shows. The arch frames the scene, the human figure gives scale, and the fog does all the atmospheric heavy lifting. Judge Daniel Kordan noted the clean composition and rare conditions that make the image unforgettable. The prize? A Hasselblad X2D II 100C Combo worth over $15K plus a SkyPixel Creator Contract. The drone cost less than the reward – a reminder that gear is only part of the equation.
What sets this shot apart is how it uses a consumer drone to deliver an expedition-level image. The Mavic 3 Pro’s 4/3 CMOS, adjustable aperture, and Hasselblad natural color science helped, but the real magic was Hrebenda’s patience and willingness to trek into the Norwegian backcountry for the right light. That’s the kind of vision no amount of hardware can replace.
Other Standouts: Lava, Architecture, and Human Patterns
The top-10 photo selections are all over the map, and that’s the point. These aren’t the same golden-hour landscapes you see every day. One shot captures an active lava flow in Iceland at sunset, the molten river splitting into glowing tributaries across black rock. Another image shows lava that cooled into a human skull shape, glowing through the cracks. Nature just did that. No staging, no post-processing trick – just the right angle and timing.
Aerial architecture work adds another flavor. One overhead shot of a sweeping white building catches its curved roofline and the shadow falling in a perfect arc. Two tiny workers near the edge give scale. Another cityscape from a severe angle compresses towers into a fractal pattern of steel and glass, warm orange light catching the upper edges. These don’t read as drone shots – they look like studio compositions, but they’re all single-capture aerials.
Human interest entries bring a totally different energy. An ice rink shot positions the drone to catch skaters’ long blue shadows on white ice – the shadows are more dramatic than the people. Another captures hundreds of people on yellow thermal blankets in a public square, arranged in a grid, each rectangle becoming a portrait frame from above. It’s part art installation, part census, part drone magic. The variety proves that altitude is just a tool; the vision is what counts.
Video Winners and What This Means for the Community
On the video side, Aerial Best Video went to “Africa Unseen” by Ellis van Jason – a seven-minute film built from over 35TB of 8K footage across Africa’s deserts, grasslands, and wildlife corridors. Gear list reads like a DJI catalog: Osmo Action 5 Pro, Avata 2, Inspire 3, Mavic 3 Pro, Ronin 4D, RS 4 Pro, and DJI Focus Pro. Van Jason took home a DJI Inspire 3 combo and a Mavic 4 Pro combo worth over $22K. He’ll need that just to store the drives.
Handheld Video grand prize went to “Elsewhere The Gaze Can Always Arrive” by AYANG, praised for its poetic narrative and seamless blend of aerial and ground footage. Prize: a DJI Ronin 4D-8K cinema camera combo worth over $18K. Both wins signal a shift: top-level drone filmmaking is no longer just about flying. It’s about production value – these are short films that happen to involve drones, not drone flights that happen to be filmed.
Here’s the takeaway for the FPV and drone community. Nearly 100K entries from 96 countries, with Emmy winners and National Geographic contributors in the mix, and the winning image came from a Mavic 3 Pro – a consumer rig that costs less than a high-end gimbal. The argument that you need pro gear to produce pro results is dead. What matters is vision, patience, and the willingness to hike somewhere cold and remote for the right shot. That’s the same mindset that makes a great freestyle or long-range pilot. SkyPixel is proving that the drone community can compete with traditional photography at the highest level, and that’s something every builder and flyer should be proud of.
Quick Facts
- •💡 Nearly 95,000 submissions from 96 countries in the 11th Annual SkyPixel Contest
- •💡 Overall Best Photo winner Filip Hrebenda used a DJI Mavic 3 Pro to capture ‘The Gate’
- •💡 Prize pool exceeded $200,000, with top photo award including a Hasselblad X2D II 100C Combo worth over $15,000
- •💡 Video winner ‘Africa Unseen’ required over 35TB of 8K footage and a multi-drone setup
- •💡 The contest demonstrates that consumer drones like the Mavic 3 Pro can rival professional gear in image quality