Photo of Chapada dos Veadeiros under the Milky Way wins world award

The Milky Way, a hill and dozens of illuminated sprinklers on a night in Chapada dos Veadeiros, in Goiás. This is the frame of the photograph taken by Brasilia native Marcio Cabral, who won the Global Grand Prize at the 17th Greenstorm Photography Festival. The work is titled 'Pandora' and competed with photographs from 116 other countries.

The official award of the prize, worth R$55 thousand, took place at the end of August, during the 17th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP17) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), in Mongolia. In this edition, more than 14 thousand photographs were entered with the theme "Beautiful Pastures and Fields".

According to Márcio, the award is the biggest environmental photography festival on the planet and the photo represents a "beauty that humanity could lose".

"The Cerrado faces immense pressure from deforestation, loss of biodiversity, and seeing this species of chuveirinho, which is an emblematic species of Chapada dos Veadeiros, being recognized globally at the UN summit, brings international visibility to the urgency of preserving our biome.", he said in an interview with g1.

In the publication that announced the winner of the award, the organization highlighted that the photograph reminds us why protecting the planet's ecosystems is so vital, capturing a connection between humanity and the environment.

Photographer Marcio Cabral says that to capture the perfect scene he had to calculate the alignment of the Milky Way and wait until 10pm, without wind, with special lighting. In 2023, in a tourist spot in the city of Alto Paraíso de Goiás, Jardim de Maytreia, the professional managed to preserve this "impossible night" forever.

Pandora is the composition of a sequence of nine long exposure photographs in the same location, which are then "stitched" together on the computer. Furthermore, the almost magical effect observed when lighting the shower heads was obtained using an optical flashlight that illuminated the plants without interfering with the brightness of the stars.

"In addition to the technique, there is a lot of prior planning and the challenge of bringing together several rare conditions at the same time: the Milky Way needs to be perfectly aligned, the sky without any clouds, zero wind so the flowers don't shake during the long exposure and also the luck of catching a year of intense flowering, since they don't bloom with this force every year", he explained.

The festival's award is just the latest won by Pandora. To g1, Marcio explained that the photograph is considered the most awarded nature photo in recent times.

This little piece of Chapada dos Veadeiros has already won the Oasis Photo Contest, in Italy, The Nature Photography Contest, in Spain, as well as awards in England and featured in the scientific magazine Nature.

Furthermore, according to Marcio, it was the only photograph by a Brazilian author chosen to be part of National Geographic's special book, which brings together the institution's 200 best photos of all time.