Microsoft has announced the winners of its Future Pro Photographer photo contest.  Yeang Ch’ng, a Wetpixel member, has won first place in the Nature & Landscape category with a beautiful image titled, “Cnidarian in the Clouds”.

“Cnidarian in the Clouds”, Copyright Yeang Ch’ng

For his first place win, Yeang won some pretty nice prizes including $2,000 cash, a Dell Precision M65 Workstation computer, a Canon EOS 30D digital SLR,  an Epson Stylus Photo 2400 printer, Adobe Creative Suite 2, ACDSee Pro Photo Manager,  a 1 year subscription to Digital Railroad, a 5 year membership in the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP), and a 5 year combined membership in the Student Photographic Society (SPS) and, when eligible, Professional Photographers of America (PPA).

Yeang writes:

I’m a MD-PhD student doing my PhD in Neuroscience at Harvard right now. I’ve been shooting seriously for about 3 years now (since I got my first DSLR, a Canon 10D). The other 2 first prize winners in the Microsoft contest were from photography schools, so it was a little intimidating not having the art background like they did. 

The shot was taken in Raja Ampat on a liveaboard trip with the M/V Shakti organized by Graham Abbott of Diving4Images. A couple of us came across this jelly floating out in the blue away from the reef, and I proceeded to follow the jelly as it drifted into the blue (not the best idea). The shot was taken at about 10 fsw, with a Sigma 15mm fisheye stopped down to f/22, 1/250 for the sunburst, and 2 x Inon Z220s at full power.

You can see some of Yeang’s work at his pbase gallery.

Related reading: [popular photography article on winners] [yeang’s image on popphoto] [microsoft future pro photographer]