On Saturday, January 26th, the festive World ShootOut 2018 award winning ceremony took place at the boot Dusseldorf. Competition participants from all over the world arrived especially for the event, including photographers from South East Asia and USA. Prizes worth more than $70,000 were awarded to the winners of the 9 categories, as well as a fair share of cash prizes.

This year World ShootOut hosted 641 amateur and professional photographers from 37 different countries around the world. The standard of images was exceptionally high and advanced techniques were impressively mastered and introduced, such as multiple exposures, snoots and black water photography.

“It’s amazing to see how every year again photographers manage to surprise us with new and creative concepts, compositions and techniques”, shared producer David Pilosof. “Just when you’re certain you’ve seen it all, you bump into a jaw-dropping image that makes me personally feel so proud of this community”.

The most valuable prize was awarded in the “5 Best Images” category to Mike Bartick from USA, who submitted a series of 5 stunning and creative black water images. Mike won a $20,000-worth 3-week diving vacation in Papua New Guinea, including domestic flights.

An Italian team of photographers won the Underwater Photography Global Championship. That is, one of the 3 Italian teams who made it to the finals (way to go Italy!!). The winners - Isabella Maffei, Alessandro Grasso and Flavio Vailati, won a $10,000-worth diving trip to Papua New Guinea, so they can work on their next winning portfolio of course…

Director of boot Dusseldorf, Petros Michelidakis, selected the “Best of the 2018” out of all images submitted to the competition this year. An image captured by Andy Schmid from Switzerland has been selected, and Andy won an Andromeda statuette, along an invitation for the boot Dusseldorf 2019 fair, including accommodation.

All other World ShootOut 2018 nominees and winners are introduced here.

In addition to the winners of World ShootOut 2018 categories, the “German Photographer of 2018”, selected by editors of the Unterwasser magazine, has been announced during the ceremony as well. Simon Lorenz won the glorious title and a 1,000 euro check, courtesy of Unterwasser Magazine.

During the ceremony, all World ShootOut production members went up on stage wearing a T-shirt introducing the “FREE LONGI” campaign. The campaign, initiated by Pilo, was aimed at rescuing a Red Sea Longimanus shark that got strangled with a rope and documented by a World ShootOut participant - Guillaume Bussiere from France. The image, which was submitted to the Sharks Category this year, alerted the World ShootOut production team, who immediately published a “FREE LONGI” campaign in search for help. Fortunately, a French research team managed to track LONGI and to rescue it just in time.

“This is a beautiful example of how us, underwater photographers, play the important role of delivering the magic, the beauty and sometimes – stress of the underwater world”, said presenter Sharon Rainis.

The World ShootOut 2019 competition has already. Photographers are invited to submit images captured anywhere in the world during 2019 no later than November 1st, 2019. Rumor has it that a new “Black Water” category will soon open as well!