It’s a mega-recycling effort: A crew of 60 males use blow torches and winches to break down a ship that had carried liquid pure gasoline. Tons of steel elements will be harvested to resell abroad. This photograph by George Steinmetz, from the Bay of Bengal in Bangladesh, is the general winner in the 2026 Siena Drone Photo Awards contest.

George Steinmetz

conceal caption

toggle caption
i

George Steinmetz

It seems to be like a spacecraft that settled gently onto a golden seaside.

Off the coast of Bangladesh, an huge vessel lies stranded on the mudflats, its metal hull partially dismantled as employees mill around it. This uncommon aerial view of a tanker, specifically designed to transport liquified pure gasoline used for cooking, electrical energy and transport, won photographer George Steinmetz the prime prize — general winner of the 2026 Siena Drone Photo Awards.

Each 12 months, the Siena Drone Photo Awards spotlight chicken’s-eye views of our planet, revealing landscapes, livelihoods and human tales usually invisible from the floor. Here, we’ve chosen some of this 12 months’s profitable and extremely counseled pictures, focusing on the international locations of the Global South.

In an interview with NPR, Steinmetz says he’s been lengthy fascinated by Bangladesh’s shipbreaking trade, where huge vessels from around the globe, nearing the finish of their working lives, are dismantled and their supplies recovered for reuse. The {photograph} is titled “Shipbreaking on the mudflats, Bay of Bengal.” Steinmetz despatched up his drone north of Chattogram (Chittagong), alongside this 13-mile coastal strip, providing a stark glimpse into what this trade is like.

He was exploring the relationship between human populations and the atmosphere for a guide undertaking and saw the trade as an extraordinary instance of recycling on a huge scale.

Photographing it proved surprisingly tough. The ship breaking trade has confronted criticism from environmental organizations, human rights teams, labor unions and non-governmental organizations for its unchecked air pollution, the leeching of chemical substances into the sea and harmful working situations. Shipyard house owners are cautious of journalists and photographers. Local photographers initially warned Steinmetz that securing entry might be almost inconceivable.

Undeterred, he surveyed and photographed the total shoreline north of Chattogram with his drone, looking for a vessel that would make an particularly putting {photograph}. He ultimately settled on the liquid pure gasoline tanker. “The trick for me was to find the right ship, that was in a really interesting state of disassembly. And these tankers are very unusual boats. It just looked weird, like some kind of a spaceship. It takes workers a long time to break it down. And then they have to wait for the tide to be right so they can pull the pieces ashore. They have big winches and boats that they use to get the stuff ashore.”

He was ready to persuade the proprietor of the tanker to enable him to {photograph} it. The timing of the drone photograph was essential. Steinmetz wished to seize the vessel at low tide, when the surrounding mudflats were uncovered and employees could be seen shifting around its huge hull. Their tiny figures would look like ants, giving viewers a sense of the ship’s mammoth scale. He spent several days photographing the vessel, returning as the tides shifted and the employees continued to take the ship aside for scrap steel.

After graduating from Stanford with a diploma in geophysics in 1979, Steinmetz had first dreamed of photographing landscapes from above while hitchhiking across Africa, usually touring on the roofs of vehicles.

In 1996, National Geographic agreed to finance an aerial images undertaking around the Sahara, for which Steinmetz discovered to fly a motorized paraglider. “It was like being in a flying lawn chair or [sitting on] the front of a spoon,” he says. Drones have now utterly remodeled aerial images, permitting photographers to seize the world from views that were once tough, costly or inconceivable to obtain, Steinmetz says.

Today, armed with a drone rather than a paraglider, he continues to discover how a view from the sky can reveal tales that stay invisible from the floor.

Southern Turkey: Carpet Fields

Fields of handwoven carpets remodel into a visible tapestry, laid out under the solar to dry. The weeks, even months, of publicity to intense daylight gives handmade rugs their immensely sought-after, softly pale colours.

F. Dilek Yurdakul

conceal caption

toggle caption
i

F. Dilek Yurdakul

Why would anyone unfold a whole bunch of stunning carpets across open fields, leaving them uncovered to a blazing Mediterranean solar for weeks or even months?

In southern Türkiye, this is half of a conventional course of that gives handmade rugs their immensely sought-after, softly pale colours. Under the intense daylight, the vibrant reds, blues and other hues step by step mellow into glowing, muted tones.

For Ankara-based documentary photographer and lawyer Dilek Yurdakul, the drone was not merely a technical selection. It was an important storytelling instrument. “I wanted to create an image that first attracts the viewer through its beauty but then invites them to look deeper, to discover the people, traditions and cultural memory behind it,” she says. The {photograph} won first place in the contest’s People part.

Yurdakul traveled six hours in blistering warmth from Ankara to the Döşemealtı district of Antalya to seize this spectacle. “The first sight was astonishing. The fields were far larger than I had imagined. Thousands of carpets and kilims in different colors, sizes and patterns stretched across an enormous landscape,” she says. From above, the carpets resemble a big patchwork quilt, virtually as if melded collectively, but her {photograph} captures the shadows between these slices of shade.

The aerial perspective allowed her to deliver collectively several layers of the story in a single body, she says: the inventive richness of Anatolian craftsmanship, the scale of the panorama and the human labor that connects them.

“For me, this was a visual metaphor for the invisibility of labor. In many societies, the people whose work sustains everyday life remain largely unseen and unrecognized.”

East Java, Indonesia: Tumpak Sewu’s Majestic Waterfall

The Tumpak Sewu waterfall in Indonesia cascades from the cliffs. The drone’s eye view exhibits Senaru Volcano rising in the distance, sending smoke into the sky.

Colas Decloitre

conceal caption

toggle caption
i

Colas Decloitre

In this photograph, extremely counseled in the Nature class, an imposing horseshoe-shaped waterfall spills over the cliffs of East Java, Indonesia, at dawn. Boston-based, French-British drone photographer Colas Decloitre had hoped to seize the fascinating form of the waterfall with Mount Semeru rising behind it. What he hadn’t anticipated was catching the lively volcano behind the waterfall, glowing purple and writhed with ash, in the center of an eruption.

“The only way to get the right alignment of the waterfall and the volcano is with a drone, as you can only be on the side of the waterfall yourself,” he says. Using his drone, he could place the waterfall against the volcano, revealing an intriguing panorama that could only be considered from the air.

Argentine Puna: The Last Ember

A small scoria cone glows crimson amid the volcanic deserts of the Argentine Puna. Surrounded by historical lava flows, ash deposits and wind-sculpted terrain, it stands as a ultimate ember in a panorama solid by hearth.

Isabella Tabacchi

conceal caption

toggle caption
i

Isabella Tabacchi

It seems to be like the glowing eye of a fiery monster.

It’s truly a volcanic cone, the pile of rock, ash and hardened lava that builds up around the mouth of the volcano over time.

The Last Ember, by Italy-based photographer Isabella Tabacchi, is an instance of how a drone photograph has the energy to remodel landscapes into a dream-like high quality. It was a counseled entry in the Nature class.

The photograph was taken in the Argentine Puna, a huge, distant, high-altitude plateau in the Andes of northwestern Argentina: a panorama of volcanoes, historical lava fields, salt flats and desert mountains. The cone’s reddish shade comes from iron-bearing minerals in the volcanic rock, while the surrounding darkish terrain consists of lava that cooled and hardened way back.

Exploring these volcanic landscapes requires cautious planning, lengthy journeys across distant terrain and fixed consideration to the situations. “At high elevations, the thin air and rapidly changing weather can also make drone operations more demanding,” Tabacchi says.

Her profitable photograph was a case of serendipity.

“I captured it during an exploratory flight, while studying the volcanic landscape and experimenting with different compositions,” she says. “It wasn’t even photographed during the golden hour [shortly after sunrise or before sunset] which is usually the time I prefer for landscape photography.”

“When I reviewed my photographs, I found myself much more attracted to this earlier composition. There was something about the geometry of the lava field, the small red cone and the immense volcanic wilderness surrounding it that felt far more powerful to me than the warmer, more traditionally dramatic light of the other photograph.”

It reminded Tabacchi of an necessary lesson she discovered all through her photographic profession: Extraordinary landscapes do not always want extraordinary mild to create a compelling picture.

“Sometimes the strength of a photograph comes from the subject itself, its shapes, its geological history and the unexpected perspective from which we discover it,” she says.

Lake Natron: What Lies Beneath

Lesser flamingos fly over Lake Natron, on the Tanzania-Kenya border, where sediment plumes transfer beneath the water’s floor.

Holly Kirkland

conceal caption

toggle caption
i

Holly Kirkland

Another counseled entry in the Nature class is Holly Kirkland’s “What Lies Beneath.”‘ At first look, it seems to be like someone splashed ink over a canvas. But what appear like tiny specks of ink are truly lesser flamingos flying over Lake Natron, close to the Tanzania–Kenya border. A former kindergarten instructor from Delaware, Kirkland is a self-taught photographer and plans to relocate to Kenya in the 12 months forward to construct a bigger physique of aerial work.

This photograph wasn’t taken with a drone. (Siena does settle for other aerial images entries in the drone class). Kirkland took the shot on a Sony A1 Mark II with a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens while hovering over the panorama in a helicopter, strapped into her seat with the door flung open.

The {photograph} displays the ecosystem of the Rift Valley soda lakes — extremely alkaline environments where these birds thrive as the dominant species. They are called soda lakes because they include exceptionally excessive concentrations of dissolved sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate, the same chemical compounds discovered in family baking soda and washing soda.

These caustic waters would burn the pores and skin of most other animals, but flamingos have developed particular variations to flip this harsh panorama into a sanctuary. For occasion, they have further leathery, scaly pores and skin on their legs to face up to chemical burns and specialised salt glands in their nasal cavity to filter out the extreme salt. It’s an necessary breeding floor for these birds, Kirkland says, with an uncommon panorama, like an totally totally different world, with “painterly looking plumes of sediment under the surface of the lake.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she says.

“I think that when you’re looking down, there’s just so many different layers of beauty that you see from above that you could never see from the ground,” she says.

Kazakhstan: Alien Land

Millions of years of sediment deposition, tectonic exercise and erosion created this formation in Mangystau. The geologic patterns are illuminated by the last mild of day.

Isabella Tabacchi

conceal caption

toggle caption
i

Isabella Tabacchi

Another extremely counseled photograph in the Nature class by Italy-based photographer Isabella Tabacchi, the Alien Land depicts the layers and patterns of deposited sediments, tectonic actions and erosion over tens of millions of years — pure geological formations in Mangystau, Kazakhstan.

“My fascination with Kazakhstan began in a rather unexpected way,” says Tabacchi. “I was flying from Tokyo to Rome when our plane encountered considerable turbulence while crossing Kazakhstan. I remember becoming curious about the vast country beneath us. In my imagination, it seemed like a land of remote, mysterious places, still waiting to be explored.”

In 2024, she traveled there for the first time. The formation featured in Alien Land, which she nicknamed Jellyfish (their branching patterns reminded her of a jellyfish swimming through water), was the consequence of intensive analysis rather than a probability encounter.

“I spent countless hours studying satellite imagery, searching for unusual geological shapes and patterns in the Mangystau desert,” she says. “Together with my guide and best friend Sav, I then explored the region in a Toyota Land Cruiser 4×4, trying to locate these formations on the ground. It was an extraordinary experience, turning shapes I’d discovered on a screen into real landscapes that I could finally photograph.”

Mangystau is one of the strangest, wildest, and most mysterious locations Tabacchi has ever visited. “There’s something about its immense, almost empty landscapes that makes me feel completely isolated from the rest of the world, as though I’m standing at the edge of infinity,” she says. “It’s a feeling I find difficult to experience anywhere else: a mixture of solitude, freedom and wonder.”

Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh: Rohingya Life Between Aid and Uncertainty

The Rohingya settlement in Bangladesh from above exhibits the overcrowded camps where these displaced folks now stay.

Shahedul Islam Sadik

conceal caption

toggle caption
i

Shahedul Islam Sadik

More than 1 million Rohingya refugees at the moment stay in Bangladesh, primarily concentrated in congested camps around Cox’s Bazar. Shahedul Islam Sadik, a scholar at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Rajshahi in Bangladesh, says he has always wished to inform their tales.

His drone shot of the settlements was counseled in the Urban class . “I wanted to document how a humanitarian crisis had reshaped not only the lives of displaced people, but also [show] the natural and geographical landscape of their place of refuge. The photograph is therefore about more than population density; it also captures the visible consequences of a prolonged crisis,” he says.

Sadik was struck by how densely populated and congested the settlements are. “What stayed with me most, however, was the sense that receiving assistance does not necessarily mean having the life one wants,” he says. “Life in the settlements can feel confined, without the freedom they once had in their homeland.”

He wished viewers to discover not only the lack of bodily area but also what it represents in the refugees’ lives. “For me, the drone photograph captures more than overcrowding; it reflects a lack of personal space, freedom and room to breathe, both literally and figuratively,” he says.

Bangladesh: Ferry boats, Dhaka

Passengers on the ferry boats at the Sadarghat Launch Terminal before the begin of the Eid al-Fitr vacation on March 18, 2026. Although a new bridge was just lately constructed across the Padma River, the rivers are still main passenger transportation routes. Due to fast urbanization, the majority of folks in Dhaka were born in rural areas and go to their ancestral residence for the weeklong vacation.

George Steinmetz

conceal caption

toggle caption
i

George Steinmetz

A burst of shade and celebration fills the waterways of Dhaka, Bangladesh, as 1000’s of folks make their manner residence for Eid, one of the most necessary festivals in the Islamic calendar.

Every 12 months, the vacation triggers a large exodus from the capital, as migrant employees and other residents journey to their hometowns to reunite with household. Ferries, packed with passengers and their belongings, become a important means of transport.

For photographer George Steinmetz, the scene provided a putting distinction to his {photograph} of Bangladesh’s shipbreaking trade. This photograph was counseled in the Urban class. From above, the crowded boats, their brightly coloured decks and passengers’ festive clothes create a vibrant patchwork against the river.

“I’ve never seen a ferry terminal like that,” he says. Dhaka’s Sadarghat Launch Terminal is widely known as one of the largest and busiest river ports in the world, frequented by 50,000 folks every day.

“It’s such a joyous scene,” he says. “They have shopping bags full of gifts of food to bring to their families. When it’s packed with people, I knew would be really epic. And again, it’s like they look like ants.”

Steinmetz captured the scene utilizing a drone launched from the rooftop of a constructing overlooking the waterfront. But he virtually missed the alternative. The skies were overcast, and rain started falling shortly after his drone made the {photograph}. Had the rain began any earlier, he might have been unable to fly his drone.

For Steinmetz, drones provide the freedom to discover a scene from totally different angles, looking for the excellent composition rather than settling for the first putting view.

“I don’t just want to get a picture. I want to get the best possible picture,” he says.

Kamala Thiagarajan is a freelance journalist primarily based in Madurai, South India. She reports on international well being, science and growth and has been revealed in The New York Times , The British Medical Journal , the BBC, The Guardian  and other retailers. You can discover her on X: @Kamal_t.

For tales about life in our altering world, subscribe to NPR’s Global Health e-newsletter.