A Software Engineer Looked at the Golden Gate Bridge From Above and Saw a Frame Nobody Else Had

A Warsaw-born engineer’s drone shot turns the Golden Gate Bridge’s own steel into a frame, landing him among 101 finalists worldwide.

recall

• The View From Inside the Steel
• Meet Photographer Marcin Zając
• The Aerial Photographer of the Year Awards
• Among the World’s Finest Skyborne Images
• Why This Golden Gate Bridge Photograph Stands Out
• What Comes Next for Aerial Photography

For a structure that’s been standing for nearly 90 years, the Golden Gate Bridge has an odd problem: everyone has photographed it, and almost nobody has photographed it like this. Most images of the bridge are taken from the same handful of vantage points — Baker Beach, the Marin Headlands overlook, the deck of a passing ferry — all of them looking at the bridge from the outside. What those shots can’t show you is what the bridge looks like from inside its own architecture, 500 feet up, where the tower’s steel crossbeam becomes a window frame and the roadway disappears into a single vanishing point below.

That’s the photograph Marcin Zając made, and it’s the reason his image, titled “Golden Gate Framed,” is now one of 101 finalists in the 2026 International Aerial Photographer of the Year competition. The shot catches the bridge just after sunrise, the tower’s rust-orange steel lit warm and low while the bay below still sits in cooler shadow, the whole scene framed by the tower’s own crossbeam like a window looking out over San Francisco Bay. It’s a picture that could only exist because a drone can go somewhere a photographer standing on the ground simply cannot.

who

Zając isn’t a full-time photographer by trade, which makes the image a little more interesting once you know the backstory. He’s a software engineer at Waymo, having previously worked as an engineer at Facebook, and he studied computer science at the University of Warsaw before relocating from Poland to Northern California — a move that, by his own account, is what pulled photography from a casual habit into something closer to an obsession. He now plans a meaningful share of his travel specifically around what he wants to photograph next, splitting his time between an engineering career and a body of landscape and aerial work that’s quietly built up an outsized footprint for someone who doesn’t do this professionally.

His track record backs that up. Zając has been shortlisted three separate years — 2019, 2020, and 2021 — for the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition run by the Royal Observatory Greenwich, winning the People’s Choice award in 2021, and in 2020 one of his images was selected as NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day. He’s also placed in the Top 101 of the International Landscape Photographer of the Year competition in both 2021 and again in 2025, that latter year with two separate images making the cut. Perhaps the most visible recognition, at least in terms of raw audience, came when Google selected eight of his photographs — spanning locations from Poland’s Tatra Mountains to Monument Valley to Yosemite — for its Chromecast and Android TV screensaver collection, a placement that reportedly introduced a wave of new followers to his work who’d never have found it through a gallery or a contest listing.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Marcin Zając 🇵🇱🇺🇸 (@mrcnzajac)

None of that is astrophotography or landscape work in the traditional sense, though — “Golden Gate Framed” is squarely an aerial piece, made with a drone rather than a tripod, which puts it in a different category of his portfolio than the night-sky and mountain work he’s best known for. It’s evidence that expanding into aerial photography as a discipline hasn’t cost him the eye that built his reputation elsewhere.

idea

The International Aerial Photographer of the Year award exists on a fairly simple premise: if you’ve ever looked out of a plane window at the landscape below and felt something shift in how you understood scale, the organizers want to see what you can do with a camera and some altitude. The competition doesn’t require an aircraft specifically — entries shot from drones, helicopters, tall buildings, or literally any vantage point that qualifies as “aerial” are all fair game — but the unifying thread across the winning work is that sense of a familiar scene made unfamiliar by height.

This year marked the competition’s second edition, and it drew nearly 1,600 entries from photographers around the world, a meaningful jump in scale for a contest still finding its footing. From that pool, three judges — Tom Hegen, Isabella Tabacchi, and Joanna Steigle, herself the previous year’s winner — narrowed the field down to a Top 101, of which Zając’s Golden Gate shot is one. Peter Eastway and David Evans, who co-convene the award, noted that this year’s entries were judged with the same care as always, with the full Top 101 collection published as a downloadable eBook through the competition’s own site.

The overall Photographer of the Year title — a separate honor from the Top 101 finalist list, awarded on the strength of a four-image portfolio rather than a single photograph — went to Azim Khan Ronnie, a Bangladesh-born, France-based documentary and travel photographer with roughly two decades of journalism experience behind him. Ronnie’s winning submission moved between a rowing team slicing through Lake Zurich in Switzerland, a chaotic gathering of migratory Siberian seagulls and city dwellers at Delhi’s Yamuna Ghat, geometric rows of chili peppers drying in Bogura, Bangladesh, and a religious ritual in Dhaka — four completely different registers of aerial storytelling united mostly by his instinct for finding human choreography from above. It’s a useful contrast to Zając’s entry: where Ronnie’s strength is people and motion, Zając’s is architecture and stillness, and the fact that both approaches can win recognition in the same competition says something about how broad “aerial photography” has become as a genre.

huh

Zając’s shot wasn’t the only structural or landscape-driven image to stand out from this year’s Top 101. Coverage of the finalist collection highlighted a striking range of other entries — Yilki horses caught mid-stride across a dusty Cappadocian plateau at sunset, a freak rain shower off the Sardinian coast that produced what one photographer called pure disbelief in the moment, and a sprawling image of what appeared to be the Kumbh Mela, one of the largest religious gatherings on Earth, all crammed into a single aerial frame. Against that backdrop, “Golden Gate Framed” reads almost as the quiet entry in the room — no crowds, no motion, no wildlife, just a 90-year-old bridge holding perfectly still for the one photograph nobody had quite taken of it before.

That contrast might actually be the image’s strongest asset. A finalist pool built heavily around movement and spectacle makes room for the opposite instinct: a photograph built entirely on architecture, symmetry, and the quality of early light. Zając’s image doesn’t compete on drama. It competes on precision.

why

Part of what makes “Golden Gate Framed” land is how disciplined the composition is. The bridge’s own crossbeam does the work a photographer would normally handle with careful cropping or a long lens — it physically frames the roadway, the suspension cables, and the bay beyond, so the viewer’s eye has nowhere to go but straight down the centerline of the deck toward the far tower and the hills of Marin County beyond it. The suspension cables fan out symmetrically on either side, turning what could have been a chaotic tangle of steel into something closer to a diagram. And the timing — caught at dawn, when the tower’s paint is lit warm and the water below still holds the blue of early morning — does the rest, giving the whole image a temperature contrast that a midday shot simply couldn’t produce.

It’s also, notably, a photograph that depends entirely on the drone as a tool rather than as a gimmick. There’s plenty of aerial photography that exists mainly to prove a drone can reach somewhere unusual. This isn’t that. The vantage point here isn’t a novelty, it’s the entire argument of the image: the Golden Gate Bridge, a structure most people have seen photographed a thousand times, still had one composition left that nobody had used, and it required a machine capable of hovering exactly where a human being physically cannot stand.

next

For now, “Golden Gate Framed” sits among the Top 101 published in the competition’s 2026 collection, available as an eBook through the International Aerial Photographer of the Year site alongside the rest of this year’s finalists. Zając’s broader body of work — landscape, astrophotography, and now aerial — continues to circulate primarily through his own channels, including his Instagram and the print shop on his personal site, where the Golden Gate image joins a catalog built as much on patience and technical planning as on the initial press of a shutter button.

Either “Golden Gate Framed” becomes the image people remember from this year’s contest or simply the shh finalist next to louder, more chaotic entries probably won’t be decided until the eBook has had time to circulate. But it’s already done the one thing a photograph of an endlessly photographed landmark almost never manages: it made a 90-year-old bridge look like something new.