At the Virtual Photography Awards, an exciting new artform continues to impress

The Virtual Photography Awards is a global in-game photography contest run by nuclear energy researcher turned virtual-photography-impresario Mik Bromley.

Bromley has watched both the awards and the art-form blossom since the first incarnation in 2020, when game worlds offered escapism from the confines of the COVID lockdown for housebound photographers with itchy feet and nowhere to go. We caught up with Bromley last year to talk about 2023’s awards. Now, Bromley returns to chat with us about the Virtual Photography Awards 2024, which received over 2,600 submissions and was judged by an expert panel of photographers and industry figures from the likes of Bungie, Remedy, and Sucker Punch.

When the Virtual Photography Awards started out, simply documenting a game was often enough to impress—a screenshot of a captivating vista carefully set up by the level designers, a crafty close-up of a brutal melee attack. Now, in just a short time, both photo mode capabilities and the ambitions of those using them have increased immeasurably. The results are digital art, not just a screenshot.

“The tools have become a lot more advanced, but so has people's artistic thinking,” says Bromley. “They're able to create their own vision that just uses the game rather than create pictures documenting what the game itself is.”

Many of this year’s terrific competition winners featured titles available on the Epic Games Store, reinvented in this exciting new artform. We asked Bromley for an expert breakdown on what makes them such effective photos, and a few tricks you can use to take your own award-winning snapshots.
 

Best Environment

Last June, Alan Wake 2 added a photo mode to what was already one of gaming’s most visually impressive (and, crucially for photographers, best-lit) environments. It was worth the wait—Bromley weighed in at launch on how to make the most of Remedy’s replication of real camera lenses. So perhaps it’s not the biggest surprise that the winning Best Environment submission by Yuuri Momma is a shot from the surreal horror masterpiece, capturing the eerie desolation of the abandoned version of New York City where titular hero Alan Wake is trapped.

The shot’s low-tilted angle emphasizes the building’s intimidating verticality. It's a location built to convey the intense powerlessness of existing here, peering up at a fog-drenched sky from a street covered in discarded newspapers. Bromley notes that, alongside conventional techniques like the traffic lights guiding your gaze upwards, the shot creates a towering sense of height with an attribute that's unique to game photography.

“An interesting thing in video game photography is whether people are a fan of the 9:16 aspect ratio. In real-world photography, cameras don't shoot in 16:9, and they certainly don't give you a 9:16 when you flip them," says Bromley, pointing out that 4:3 is considered standard, including for mobile phone photography.

He continues, "The 9:16 aspect ratio largely exists [in video games] because that's a screen on its side. A lot of the time people use that just because it's the default, but it doesn't actually help the composition because you get a lot of wasted space. This picture absolutely uses 9:16 effectively, as the height is fully utilized.”
 

Creative Winner

Since release—and especially since the 2.0 upgrade with its vast improvements to textures, lighting, and character models—Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City has been a popular playground for any budding photographer. But that spectacular night-time city isn’t the focus of this shot in a category that encourages going beyond light-touch post-production into the creation of digital art.

Jenny Karlsson’s pop-art piece superpositions two photos of the same character with overlapping color filters. Bromley says that it may look simple, with a flat background and a limited palette that mirrors the effect of 3D glasses, but there’s subtle depths—the two poses express a spectrum of emotional moods in a single moment.

The subject’s arms, ambiguously stretched out behind them, is an integral part of the photo lending the character a subdued but discernible mood. It’s not a pose found within the game, though. Many players are now using mods to develop a valuable skill: manipulating character rigging to reposition their bodies to create a scene.

Bromley points out this is an age-old tradition—screenshot art has existed for practically as long as video games, at least on the back of boxed copies and in magazine advertisements. To this day, pro screenshot artists use in-engine tools to create visually appealing bespoke shots. Using mods, players can too.
 

Portrait Winner

A black-and-white close-up of a woman, eyes wide in fear, face half-shrouded in darkness. It could be anyone—perhaps a short-lived character in Until Dawn?

In fact, Jeremy Harrison’s submission depicts Mary Jane Watson from Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, with a color filter removing her defining visual characteristic—her vibrant red hair.

At first, Bromley wasn’t the biggest fan of this portrait, pointing out that the extended aspect ratio removes focus from its subject’s face. Detail alone does not make for a good portrait, especially as graphical fidelity continues to advance. He didn’t enjoy looking at this piece. MJ’s expression made him feel unsettled—but that was a mark of the photo’s resounding success.

“An important part of the portrait is to engage the viewer, maybe to put you in the position of the photographer or to feel something from that character. I don't enjoy looking at it and I feel uneasy—but I think that's because you're feeling her unease.”
 

Collection and Overall Winner

A new category for this year, Best Collection was introduced after a conversation with the International Center of Photography. Bromley showed them a selection of the competition’s finest entries, but they were unimpressed. Bromley’s quick to add that this wasn’t because the New York institute rejected the medium’s merits. As it turned out, they wanted to see more.

“He said ‘Single images don't impress me,’” explains Bromley. “He said anybody can take one good shot, and that's not impressive. What he wants to see, from an artistic level, is for people to create a bigger body of work to show a unique style or tell an overall narrative. The Collection category exists to invite that.” Bromley was thrilled with the number of responses and the creativity he saw across the submissions, which guarantees its return next year.

Jonathan’s (no surname given) inaugural winner was a real crowd-pleaser, taking us back to New York for Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales. The black-and-white series of architectural shots wouldn’t be out of place decorating the walls of New York cafes, or adorning the pristine pages of a coffee table book. Hell, the striking angular shadows of the third photo in the series would suit the poster of a noir movie classic like The Third Man!

Jonathan’s photo series makes it seem like all it takes is converting scenery shots to grayscale to magically make game environments photo-real. Bromley is quick with a reminder that isn’t the case: composition, choice of subject matter, and awareness of the original colors and contrast are key.

“Not every picture works in black-and-white,” he says. “A lot of the time, if you've got too many colors when you convert to black-and-white, you just get a lot of gray. You need some definition. Jonathan used the sky as a bright background, then layered the black-and-white on what I'd guess are probably pretty bland colors. If you saw the photos in color, you'd probably be less impressed by them because the black-and-white enhances the details of the building and makes it more about contrast than about color. Converting to black-and-white isn't just pressing a button!”

For those wanting to experiment with black-and-white photography, Bromley says that, while in-game photo mode filters are effective, the best results come from experimenting afterwards with brightness and exposure levels to preserve detail and create the balance between light and dark to make the image pop. And an all-important step: Checking that an image displayed on a bright monitor or television displays as intended elsewhere.

As for anyone interested in creating their own collection for the 2025 competition, Bromley says patience and adaptability are key skills. Find an idea, a subject, an image, see where it takes you, and come back to it over time—don’t expect to find the perfect set of shots right away. But, with time and effort, you’ll find them. Like the hard-to-impress International Center of Photography says, anyone can take a fantastic photograph. Get snapping and take one of your own, maybe after reading more of Bromley’s expert photography tips.

And when you find one you like—perhaps after spending time in the lavish worlds of Red Dead Redemption 2, Horizon Forbidden West, or Star Wars Outlaws—consider submitting it to this year's Virtual Photography Awards!