The winners of our Patience is a virtue long exposure competition are...

It took some serious deliberation. There were a lot of emails between us. There was even the odd expletive. Finally, however, Haje, Tom, and I have selected our five favourite photos from the Photocritic Long Exposure Competition. In no particular order I present to you the winners of Patience is a Virtue:

Set Fire to the Rain by Cybjorg

Sunrise at Botany Bay, Edisto Island by Luke Robinson

Tower Bridge traffic by Nick Jackson

Blades of Light by Paul Shears

and Cairngorm Panorama by Ian Appleton

Many congratulations to the five of you! I shall be in contact presently to enable to you claim your Triggertrap gift card prizes!

We'd also like to say thank you to everyone who entered and made our lives a little bit tricky when it came to selecting a winner. As Haje said when we first sat down to draw up a shortlist of our favourites: 'There's some serious talent there!' Please do go look at the selection in the Flickr pool: there are some inspiring images.

The Sony World Photography Awards 2014 - the winners

The winners of the Sony World Photography Awards were announced at a rather swanky awards dinner on Wednesday evening. There were lots of speechless speeches, some very dapper men in black tie, a delicious Cabernet Sauvignon, and a ludicrously chocolately chocolate dessert. I did try to live tweet the winners, I promise. My attempts were rather frustratingly thwarted by a complete lack of signal at the venue. And you can't vouch for the fact that I picked out the winner of l'Iris d'Or, either. Ah well. I've put together a selection of winning images. Tell me what you think.

The press view of the awards exhibition was something of a whirlwind (I think the words I used in my feedback were 'I feel as if I've been put through a blender.') but Lewkowicz's series stood out by a mile. The images are extremely powerful, in some cases you can feel the fear seeping out of them, but she's accomplished something wonderful in being able to capture them.

I don't think that I've any desire to attempt to cross a pillared bridge in the pouring rain, but this photo does make me want to try it, all the same.

The three finalists in the Youth category all submitted very strong images. If they're the future, I think the medium's safe.

Enough to make your mouth water? The winners of the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year 2014

The winners of the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year 2014 were unveiled earlier this week, with the over all prize of £5,000 going to Tessa Bunney for her photo Noodle Making, drawn from the Food in Action category. According to Andy Macdonald, who sat on the judging panel: 'The competition was intensely fierce, there were 6000 images entered internationally and the standard was phenomenal. Tessa’s image stood out from the rest, however, for its beautiful composition, the expression of utter absorption on its subject’s face, and the capture of a perfect moment in time as the noodle dough flies through the air.'

What do you think? Is this is a competition-winning entry? Do you agree with the judges about the shot perfectly capturing a moment in time? We've put some of the other category-winning images here so that you can compare, along with two of the Young People's entries, too.

400 images shortlisted for the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year competition

From over 6,000 entries, 400 potential winners have been selected for the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year competition and among them there's a welter of images from photographers aged under 17. Youngsters were able to enter their photos into three age categories—under 10, 11 to 14, and 15 to 17—and provided that they featured food, they were fair game for the competition. Now that the entries have been shortlisted, the judges, who include Yotam Ottolenghi and Jay Rayner, will whittle down their lists further. Overall winners can be selected to receive their awards on 23 April and be exhibited at the Mall Galleries in London between Thursday 24 and Sunday 27 April 2014.

Winners from the young people's categories will be presented with vouchers to put towards new camera kit!

You can take a look at all of the shortlisted young people's photos, together with the adult short-listed images, on the special Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year Shortlisted Gallery.

Scandal and drama at the Youth World Photography Awards as a winner is disqualified

Here's a life lesson: if you think that you can get away with submitting an image to an age-restricted photography competition, a competition in which you're subsequently named as a winner, when you're actually older than you're supposed to be, you should probably think again. The chances are that you'll be found out. Then you'll be stripped of your prize and you'll be plastered across the Intergoogles for all the wrong reasons. This is precisely what happened to Borhan Mardani, who was named as the winner of the Culture category of the Youth Sony World Photography Awards on Tuesday.

Mardani, it turns out, wasn't 19 when he took his 'winning' image, as he stated in his written declaration. Now that he's been found out, his prize has been removed from him and instead awarded to 19 year old Anastasia Zhetvina, from Russia, for her image Young talents.

Anastasia will now join Paulina Metzscher and Turjoy Chowdhury, the two other Youth finalists, in winning a Sony A5000 and the chance to be named Youth Photographer of the Year and flown to London to celebrate at the Sony World Photography Awards' party at the end of April.

Winners - the Sony World Photography Awards Open Competition

In the run-up to the gala awards ceremony in London at the end of April, the ten category winners of the Sony World Photography Awards Open division have been announced, selected from over 70,000 entries made by amateur photographers. Each of them wins a new Sony A6000 camera and they're up with a chance of winning the $5,000 prize that accompanies the title Overall Open Photographer of the Year.

• Architecture – Holger Schmidtke, Germany
• Arts and Culture – Valerie Prudon, Australia
• Enhanced – Kylli Sparre, Estonia
• Low Light - Vlad Eftenie, Romania
• Nature & Wildlife – Gert van den Bosch, Netherlands
• Panoramic – Ivan Pedretti, Italy
• People - Arup Ghosh, India
• Smile - Alpay Erdem, Turkey
• Split Second - Hairul Azizi Harun, Malaysia
• Travel - Li Chen, China

As well as their new cameras, all of them will have their images exhibited at Somerset House, London between 1 and 18 May 2014, and the winner of the Overall Open Photographer of the Year title will be flown to London to collect her or his prize at the ceremony.

Nigel Atherton, the jury chair commented: 'Nigel Atherton, Jury Chair, comments: 'Photography is a language that transcends national borders and cultures, race, gender and social background....No two of this year’s Open category winners are from the same country but all share the ability to visually interpret the world around them in a unique and captivating way. The winning and shortlisted images demonstrate this gift with aplomb.'

And the winner of the Social Photography cover competition is...

Actually, that should read 'And the winners are...' We received over 200 submissions to the competition to see one of your photos feature on the front cover of my next book published by the Ilex Press. There were landscapes, portraits, and macros, wildlife, architectural, and street photography shots. Some were in colour, some were in black and white; some people had chosen to apply filters, some hadn't. We were delighted by the number of entries and seriously impressed by their quality. Choosing one winner became such a difficult task that we decided that perhaps two would be a better option. It cut down on the nail-biting and shouty emails. I am very pleased and proud to announce, then, that the two images which will feature on the front cover of Social Photography will be:

by Ben Denison

and

by Elisa Alonso Aller

We chose Ben's photo for its instantly recognisable scene fused with gorgeous colours and great composition. We liked Elisa's for its bold colours and great story. Congratulations, both. We'll be in touch soon to organise the tiresome admin of licences and the rather more exciting receipt of prizes.

Everyone who entered made it a tough job to select a winner; thank you. It really wasn't an easy selection process: you gave us so much to consider. And now Designer Kate has to re-jig the cover design... again!

A surreally good competition winner

It's been a little while coming, we know, but Haje and I have finally settled on the winner and runner-up for our surreal-inspired photo competition. It was a very close call between the two, but we're delighted to announce that the spoils go to: Phantom Lake, by They call me Alex.

and The Grind, by Hooker771

What appealed to us about both these photos was that neither relies on extensive manipulation. They're in-camera surreal creations. And they look terrific, in particular because of their gorgeous use of colour.

Congratulations both Hooker771 and They call me Alex!

The Ilex Press has very kindly provided a copy of my newest book, Surreal Photography: Creating the Impossible, for the winner. I hope that you enjoy it!

As an aside, that was the last competition that we'll be running for the forseeable future. It was a great deal of fun to dream up themes and watch you complete the briefs with such enthusiasm, but we thought that we'd quit while we're ahead. Thank you to anyone who ever entered and to those who generously provided prizes, too.