With the most entries in the contest’s 11-year history, the 2018 Sony World Photography Awards entries still managed to deliver an impressive amount of diversity, judges say. The World Photography Organization recently announced the 2018 shortlisted winners, a list of photographers in every category that move on to the next phase of the contest to compete for category and overall titles.

With almost 320,000 entries, this year brought the most submissions the contest has seen yet, with a 40-percent jump over the previous year. Photographers from more than 200 countries entered the contest, while the different categories cover a range of skill levels and ages, including professional, open, youth, and student focuses.

“The range of work considered was breathtaking, and diversity among the judges ensured robust discussions, leading to outstanding winners,” said judge Naomi Cass, the director for the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne, Australia. “I was impressed by the diversity of approaches within each category and the breadth of photographers from across the globe.”

The contest judges said that both the professional contest, which is a series of images, and the open contest, which is for a single image, saw a wide variety of strong images. In the professional category, the contest added two new categories; creative and discovery, while for the open, the street photography, landscape, and nature categories saw the most entries.

The shortlisted photographers are now competing for category titles as well as the Photographer of the Year, with a $25,000 award in the professional category and a $5,000 award in the open. Category winners will receive gear from the contest sponsor, Sony, while in the student focus contest, the winner will garner imaging equipment for their school.

“From new approaches to portraiture to creative responses to the landscape in which we live, the images illustrated what a broad and innovative field photography has become,” said judge Clare Grafik, the head of exhibitions at the Photographer’s Gallery in London. “As our way of experiencing photographic images becomes all the more multifarious, the Awards offer us the opportunity to focus on new talents and important projects that may otherwise have passed us by.”

The final contest winners will be announced on April 19 in London, with all the shortlisted images opening in the Somerset House gallery the following day. To view the entire gallery of shortlisted images, visit the contest’s website.