SINGAPORE – A whole lot of patience and a stroke of beginner’s luck. Singaporean photographer Ng Guang Ze attributes these two factors to his double wins at the recent Sony World Photography Awards.

The fourth-year architecture student from the National University of Singapore won the awards for his other-worldly Curved Stream image.

It is a tranquil black-and-white scene of a stream meandering through the grasslands of Wenhai Lake in Lijiang, in China’s Yunnan province. The Yulong Snow Mountain looms on the horizon.

Curved Stream clinched the 25-year-old the national award for Singapore, plus a second award in the landscape category in the open competition. His photo trumped 419,000 other images from more than 200 countries and territories submitted for the prestigious contest, now in its 18th year. 

The journey to create the photograph spanned far and wide. It began in September 2024 when Mr Ng travelled to Beijing for a four-month exchange semester with Tsinghua University.

While in China, his love for photography and travel lured him to the beautiful landscapes of Urumqi in Xinjiang, as well as Lijiang in Yunnan.

He decided to visit Yunnan in December 2024 after noticing on Chinese social media that the south-west province was trending as a tourism hot spot.

He chose to explore the Wenhai area, instead of hitting the Yulong snow mountain trail, the usual tourist route. He knew he wanted to include the mountain in his photograph, rather than shoot from it.

Often the lone traveller, Mr Ng usually plans his shoots based on the best times of the day, when the light is gentle. He then organises his itinerary around this, arriving at his destination to scout for the best spots and compositions, decide on the camera settings, then wait it out for the best light to fall – and hope for the best.

Armed with three camera bodies – the Nikon Z6II and FM2, as well as the Leica M6 – plus a couple of lenses and a tripod, he began exploring the vast area, about twice the size of Bedok Reservoir. Arriving after lunch, he took his time to discover interesting angles and compositions at the deserted lake.

He was at Wenhai for two days, and discovered the spot where he shot his winning photo on the first day.

It was towards the end of his first day, while he was making his way back to the Didi rental car he had hired, that he found the scene that he had envisioned, after scouting for about three hours.

An excited Mr Ng set up his tripod and camera...