Jason Kottke pointed to the 2026 Aerial Photographer of the Year winners, and I’ve been staring at them ever since.

I don’t think we give aerial photography enough credit as an art form. When people talk about serious photography, they reach for portraits and landscapes and street work. The view from above gets filed under “drone footage”, like it’s a gimmick. Look at these images and that idea falls apart. A crowded beach becomes a pattern. Farmland reads like an abstract painting. Some of these shots are genuinely beautiful, and they show you a version of the world you’d never see standing on the ground.

In a year when my feeds are full of images that never happened, there’s something grounding about a competition built entirely on people who went up in the air and captured something real.