South Africa’s top iPhoneographers announced for 2015

South Africa’s 2015 iPhoneography competition came to a close at the Southern Sun The Cullinan in Cape Town on Thursday night, revealing the country’s top iPhone photographers.

The Cape Town overall winner is Shen Winberg. Other category winners include Barry Baumgart, Kevin Smith, André de Jager, Thoban Jappie, Charlie JvR and White Shadow.

In Johannesburg, Jaco van der Walt was recognised for having the best portrait and is the overall winner. Other Johannesburg winners include Jonathan Boynton, Chad Nathan, Aamina Richards, Bilal Ally and Lee-David de Haas.

The rules are quite straight forward for the competition, use an iPhone to take the image, and can edit with any iOS image editing app, like Snapseed, VSCOM, and Camera+.

This year, the organisers of the competition saw more than 2 000 entrants with more than 8 000 entered pictures. Over the last five years that the competition has been in existence, it has had 18 200 entries all together.

Best Scenery and overall winner: Shen Winberg, The ruins in Atafona, BrazilThe categories that the entrants were competing in were Abstract, Still Life, Scenery, Portrait and My SA. There was also a category for Absolute, iStore partners in the competition.

Though there were incredible images this year, the quality of the images was not great, many of the images had the usual over editing that is familiar with Instagram images, with dark edges and different hues of colours on the image. This is the challenge for the competition, tearing itself away from the bad editing and framing of the Instagram generation.

Read more: These iPhoneography SA winners are true iPhone shutterbugs

The night began with radio personality Gareth Cliff talking about how the portrait category would be way better in Cape Town and that the Mother City needn’t worry about losing its status as the capital of hipsters to Johannesburg any time soon.

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Best Portrait and overall winner: Jaco van der Walt, Emergence

The judges for this year included Marc Forrest, the co-founder of iPhoneography, Khaya Dlanga, senior communications manager for content excellence and digital at Coca-Cola, Rowan Eva, business director of Ogilvy & Mather in Cape Town, and Jeanette Verster, lifestyle and wedding photographer.

Winners in the competition win iPads, iPhone covers, Absolute bottles and other goodies.