Photo Competition Pictures 2026

Scars of Fire transforms U.S. wildfire data from 1983–2025 into the cross-section of a living tree. Each ring represents a year, with ring width determined by acres burned. Color shifts from cool blue to deep red as wildfire impact intensifies. Dot density reflects the number of fires, while dot size conveys fire intensity. Together, the rings reveal a decades-long pattern of increasing wildfire impact, turning scientific records into a visual archive of ecological change, resilience, and loss.

Star Map translated into earthly coordinates and overlaid with a world map. I wanted to provide a way of visualizing galactic entities in an earthly frame of reference. It provides a new perspective on typical star charts, letting us see ourselves in the context of the universe.

Research shows that insufficient sleep heightens students' stress. My data art visualizes this research with bubbles floating through a sea of contrasting blue and red. The intense red conveys the anxiety of students sleeping only 4–6 hours, while the calming blue illustrates the peaceful emotions of those sleeping 8–10 hours. The floating bubbles evoke a sense of movement and possibility, suggesting that students can shift easily from red to blue, high to low stress, by simply sleeping more.

Traces of the smallest particles in the universe are captured by the Large Hadron Collider.

This artwork compares the immune system of an infant with that of an older adult. The infant and older adult figures are filled with the same overall number of marks, so the image does not represent total cell count. Instead, it represents immune composition: the changing proportions of immune cell types across a lifetime. The two figures are not opposites, but records of different moments in biological life from innocent beginnings to the mature end time of life.