In addition to the American Photography Open 2023 prizes, our partner Tamron Americas once again sponsored our Landscape and Travel category grand prize and runners-up winners. Today we’re pleased to announce the judging results: The grand prize award goes to R. Tom Sizemore of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, for his image “Tuscan Vineyard,” made during a celebratory trip Italy in June of 2022.

“Being at the ‘end' of covid, I decided to rent a car and drive through Tuscany by myself,” Sizemore says. Travling through the region in central Italy, he decided to take an exit off a main thoroughfare to see where it would lead. “When you come to a fork in the road, take it!” he says.

Sizemore, a retired ophthalmologist, is a U.S. Navy veteran and, as he puts it, a “lifelong photographer” who began taking pictures at age 15 with his uncle’s  Argus C-3. “But it wasn’t until 2018 that I really started working on my photography,” he says.

What he found after making his spur-of-the-moment detour in Italy was a narrow dirt road leading to a farm. “It was stunning,” he says of the scene, which he was determined to photograph. “I was able to take my time to set up the shot using a tripod, because there was no traffic." He shot with a Nikon D850 and 16-35mm lens at 16mm. He later cropped the image into a square format and used a photo-editing software to make various adjustments to the image.

You can see more of Sizemore’s work at his website.

As the category winner, Sizemore will receive a Tamron 35-150mm F2-2.8 Di III VXD (model A058) lens for Sony mirrorless cameras ($1899 value).
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Runner Up: John R. Gahm’s “Reflections in Norway”

John Gahm is a retired carpenter from central Illinois who found the photo of a lifetime while visiting Norway last February. “I’d always dreamed of viewing the northern lights and had the opportunity to go to Alaska in 2022 to see them,” he says. “I enjoyed the trip to Alaska, and some of the folks I was with there said they would be going to Norway in February of 2023, so I made that journey also,” he says. “We were in the Lofoten Islands near the Village of Flakstad at about 2:45 AM when I had the opportunity to take this photograph.”

Though not a professional photographer, Gahm knows a thing or two about shooting at night in Norway in February: “It helps in the extreme cold to keep a spare battery in your pocket and hand warmers placed around the lens with a rubber band,” he says

Runner Up: Juan DeLeon’s “Milky Way Over a Gas Station”

“I've enjoyed taking pictures since high school and wanted to go to college as a fashion designer but ended up studying drafting design,” says Juan DeLeon. “I went back to college to study photography and eventually gave up engineering and began doing photography full-time in 2016.” Based in Houston, Texas, DeLeon focuses on event photography, headshots, and portrait photography, and in his free time he travels around the state with his camera gear. In the summer of 2021 he was in Big Bend National Park, where he made the photo that earned him a spot among the winners of this year’s Tamron Americas Landscape and Travel category.

“I knew that I wanted to do star trails and the Milky Way,” he says. “I saw this gas station during the day and decided to return in late evening. The Milky Way was right over the gas station, so I stopped and set up my equipment. The challenge was to get the Milky Way in focus and also show the details of the gas station. I photographed the sky first to keep it in the center of the  station. I then used an external light and flash to highlight the station, road, bushes and trees. It took me three hours to get what I felt was useful material to put together into the final photo.”

See more of Juan DeLeon's work at his website.

Our two runners up each receive a Tamron 28-75mm F/2.8 Di III VXD G2 (model A063) lens for Sony mirrorless cameras ($899 value). Congratulations to all three of this year's winners.