CUPOTY 7 names 15 winners from over 12,000 close-up submissions

The seventh Close-up Photographer of the Year competition announced its winners on 5 February 2026, naming 15 prize-winning images drawn from more than 12,000 submissions across 63 countries. The overall grand prize and the Underwater category went to Australian photographer Ross Gudgeon for Fractal Forest, a shot made from inside a cauliflower soft coral in Indonesia’s Lembeh Strait that upends familiar macro angles.

Fractal Forest earned Gudgeon the £2,500 top award, an amount various outlets converted to roughly $3,400–$3,420. The image was captured from within the coral colony in Lembeh Strait, a biodiversity-rich dive site that separates Lembeh Island from North Sulawesi Province and sits near a large modern port. Coverage notes two ways of describing Gudgeon’s technique: he “carefully pushed an extended macro lens through the coral’s branches, capturing images from inside out,” while other accounts describe the frame as shot with an “underwater probe lens.” The result offers an immersive, otherworldly perspective that resonated with judges and the community.

CUPOTY staged the contest across 11 categories spanning animals, insects, butterflies and dragonflies, spiders and other invertebrates, underwater shots, plants, fungi and slime molds. A 22-person panel of photographers, naturalists and editors spent more than 20 hours selecting a Top 100 and the 15 winners. CUPOTY co-founder Tracy Calder called it a brutally competitive year. “This was the toughest competition yet,” she said. “The winning image embodies everything close-up photography can achieve – it shows us a perspective we’ve never seen before and reveals hidden beauty in a familiar subject. The judges were captivated.”

Beyond Gudgeon’s prizewinner, the winners list includes a wide range of fieldcraft and vision. Sho Hoshino’s Dreamy State captures an intimate landscape of rime ice in Nagano Prefecture, Japan; he described his approach: “I took this photograph when frost-covered trees stood before a mist that turned pink in the morning sunlight. The composition relies on soft, pale tones, anchored by the dark, intricate shape of the tree trunk and its distorted form. I intentionally excluded the base of the tree to highlight the complexity of its trunk.” Underwater placings included Daniel Sly’s portrait of an orange painted frogfish in second and a crinoid shrimp in a feather star in third. Other named winners in coverage include Filippo Carugati’s Amphibian Galaxy and Laurent Hesemans’ Good Boy.

For the close-up community, CUPOTY’s annual showcase is more than a trophy: it’s a technical and creative resource. CUPOTY packaged the Top 100 and winners into a digital edition featuring 123 full-page photos with captions and technical information, 241 tips from awarded photographers, 647 shortlisted photographs and 373 pages of imagery and advice. A launch-week special price was offered, and CUPOTY 8 opens for entries in May 2026.

What this means for readers is straightforward: the bar for macro and close-up work keeps rising, and the community has fresh study material. Study Fractal Forest for composition and perspective, compare probe-lens and extended-macro techniques across the Top 100 spreads, and consider entering CUPOTY 8 armed with tighter fieldcraft and a concept that reveals something unseen.