Look at the Gear Used by Sony World Photography Awards 2022 Winners

The National Award winners of the 2022 Sony World Photography Awards were recently announced. While we don’t classify the success of a winning image based on what gear was used, it’s nevertheless a fun stat to read about. Here’s a breakdown of the cameras and lenses used (where the information is available) to produce the winning image for each country’s top photographers.

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Cameras Used by the National Award Winners

While Sony is the title sponsor for the competition, there was no restriction on photos shot with other brands of cameras being entered into the global contest. A wide variety of brands make up the National Award winners of this year’s World Photography Awards. We’ve delved deep to get you a breakdown of the camera brands and lenses used.

Mirrorless cameras made up a significant portion of the cameras used, but DSLRs weren’t far behind. There’s also a handful of winners who used drones, one who used a compact camera, and even a smartphone user. Here’s the list of cameras we were able to get data about:

The National Awards program is an initiative set up by the World Photography Organisation and Sony to support local photographic communities around the world, with 61 countries taking part this year.
World Photography Organisation Feb 8th Press Release

Statistics

Among the total of 65 winners announced by the World Photography Awards in the National Award category, we were able to extract EXIF data for most of them. Fourteen of these had no camera and/or lens information in the EXIF data. When we contacted the organization to see if they had this information on them, we received this response – “We don’t share information on camera types – a wide range are used by the winners of these awards.” The statistics below are generated from the data we managed to get from the image files.

Camera brand breakdown for the National Category winners

The most used camera on the list was the Sony A7R III. At least nine winners used this mirrorless camera for their winning entry. This was followed by the Sony A7 III with at least five winners using this camera to grab the top award for their nation’s entry. Sony was also the leading choice of camera brand for winning entries, with at least 25 winners using their cameras for their submitted entries. Canon DSLRs and mirrorless cameras were used by 10 winners. Nikon followed closely with nine winners using DSLRs for all but one entry. The youngest DSLR on the Nikon list was the D5500, which shows that you don’t need the latest camera to produce a winning photograph. DJI’s drones took four of the winning images. Fujifilm had a couple, and Apple’s iPhone 12 Pro Max was used by one.