It’s exciting times here at Scubaverse.com, as the photo of the year 2015 is about to be announced.

Just in case you haven’t been following our monthly photography competitions, the rules are quite simple: any underwater photographer can enter. You can submit up to three pictures each month. This can be wide angle or macro and taken on any camera, compact or DSLR. The pictures can be recent or taken several years ago. It’s also really nice if the photographer can add a brief description explaining where the picture was taken, camera settings etc. This helps me understand how and why you took the picture in the first place.

At the end of each month I ‘simply’ choose a winner from all the entries. I’m not biased in any way, and it’s judged on a variety of factors, including composition, subject, level of difficulty etc. I also look at the technical aspects like focus, lighting, contrast and post editing skills. I honestly didn’t realise how tough this job would be – there were so many stunning images submitted in 2015.

The winning photographer gets his/her picture displayed on Scubaverse.com’s homepage for the duration of the month, wins a £100 voucher towards a Scuba Travel Red Sea liveaboard workshop with Duxy, and gets a copy of Vivid-Pix’s excellent post editing software. The winning picture also appears in our Photo of the Month Winners Gallery and is used as the background image on Scubaverse.com’s Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Tumblr pages.

In addition to all this, each month’s winning picture is also entered into our Photo of the Year Contest. The winner of Photo of the Year will pick up some serious prizes – over £1,000 worth of dive gear – donated by Mares, one of the world’s leading diving equipment manufacturers, and a further £150 voucher off a Red Sea liveaboard photo workshop with Duxy, courtesy of UK-based dive tour operator Scuba Travel.

Because we only began the monthly competitions in March last year there are a total of 9 pictures this time around (we also missed May due to the site having a major redesign).

So if you didn’t know about the competition rules and the prizes, now you do!

If you are wondering why I have been asked by Dave, the editor of Scubaverse.com, to judge your pictures, well in brief I have been working in the diving industry for more than 25 years. I started out as a diving instructor running recreational and technical courses and was then introduced to underwater photography. I have managed my own photography business at Taba Heights in Egypt, owned a retail shop in the UK and regularly write articles and take underwater photographs for magazines. I hope this gives me some credibility to judge your pictures.

For Photo of the Year we have invited some other well-known underwater photographers to be on the judging panel. I didn’t think it would be fair for me to choose a winner on my own. I also didn’t want anyone to think the result had been rigged!!! As we are giving away a £100 voucher for Duxy’s Red Sea liveaboard photography workshops each month it’s only right that we ask him to be on the panel. Nick Robertson-Brown, who owns Frogfish Photography with his wife Caroline and who also writes regularly for Scubaverse.com, completes the esteemed line up.

Duxy, Nick and I individually looked at each picture and chose a top three. From the top three images we then thrashed it out until we finally agreed on one overall winner.

I’m very pleased to announce that the winner of Scubaverse.com’s Photo of the Year 2015 is Sean Chinn’s turtle picture titled ‘sunbathing’. This is a superb wide angle image of a green turtle sitting on the reef at Sipadan Island in Malaysia. I really liked the angle at which Sean took the picture (below the subject and shooting upwards), the reef looks healthy and there’s lots going on in the background including clouds and sunshine. Well done Sean, I hope to see more of your images in 2016.

I would like to give a huge thank you to Mares for providing the superb prize, not forgetting Scuba Travel and Vivid-Pix for the monthly donations. I’m sure 2016 is going to be bigger and better. Judging by the amount of entries in January’s competition I’m going to have my work cut out!

You can enter Scubaverse.com’s Photo of the Month Contest here. The contest generally runs from the 5th to the 25th of each month.