The annual Y/OUR Denver photo contest has a wide-open set of rules for entry: Competitors can be amateur or professionals, and they can submit any kind of picture they want, as long as it captures the interior or exterior of a local building.

The images don’t even have to be recent; photographers can dig out an old favorite from their digital files and send it in.

Those free-wheeling guidelines are the secret to the success of this long-running contest. That, and a low-entry fee — just $10 for three photos — that the organizers offer to wave if they are asked.

Each year, a wide variety of submissions arrive, and most get right to the heart of this effort, which is co-sponsored by the Denver Architecture Foundation and the Colorado Photographic Arts Center. They show off Denver’s best-built assets — houses, skyscrapers, museums, parks, streets and monuments — but through the unique viewpoints of the people who live, work and play among them every day.Some of the photos are casual and candid. They feel like snapshots taken during a neighborhood dog walk on an evening when the sunset was putting on a particularly brilliant show.

Others have the air of polished, professional images, perfectly lit and carefully cropped to highlight a building’s best attributes. They are the type that you might see in a real estate brochure or a magazine devoted to interior design.

This year’s top photos fall more into that latter category. Several of the winners work full-time at taking photos, and their images reflect that professionalism. They are careful studies of their subjects, frozen at just the perfect moment.

That might be because this year’s juror was James Florio, one of the region’s top architectural photographers.

Florio has taken images for major magazines and published several books of his work, ranging from deep dives into individual buildings or design firms to more experimental projects that look at the art of photography itself.

In 2022, Florio won the prestigious Excellence in Photography Award from the Julius Shulman Institute, perhaps the country’s top honor in this specialized field. Lately, he is the subject of a short documentary, “James Florio at Tippet Rise,” chronicling his obsessive efforts to photograph the sprawling grounds of the Tippet Rise Art Center in rural Montana.

So, perhaps it is no surprise that the winners are mostly pros themselves, starting with Peter Loyd-Vuolo, who took the Best in Show prize with his photo of the recently constructed 50 Fifty Building in the Denver Tech Center masterminded by Clutch Design Studio.

The shot shows off the building’s most notable asset: its graceful use of high-tech materials that are brought together into a sleek, asymmetrical, 12-story office tower that raises the design bar for DTC.

But it also captures the building’s context — how it stands tall and reflects the Colorado sunlight, how it relates to the structures around it, how it fits into the natural landscape.

Interestingly, the photo captures 50 Fifty behind a lanky and statuesque tree that actually obscures part of the view — a clever way of showing scale and environment while still getting at the building’s modern soul.

I asked Loyd-Vuolo, a professional interior and architectural photographer based in Denver, how he got the shot. He said he was actually doing another job in the Tech Center when he noticed the 50 Fifty Building. He was fascinated by it and decided to make an image for his portfolio.

“It took me two days of scouting at sunset and sunrise to find the right angle and time of day. Ultimately, I found that sunrise offered the ideal lighting condition,” he wrote in an email. “Layering the natural form of the tree against the geometric shape of the building created a composition that I found captivating and beautiful.”

Similar care went into the work of other experienced pros who took honors in this year’s Y/OUR Denver. Mickkail Cain, who won the award for Best Exterior photo, found just the right angle to frame the Denver Art Museum’s Ponti Building. It’s a canny shot that emphasizes the structure’s circular, street-level entranceways rather than its vertical height.

The nod for Best Landscape Architecture photo went to Jonathan L. Clark for his shot of the open space at the corner of California and 18th streets in downtown Denver.

Clark shot the tiny park from above and framed it with the edges of nearby high-rise office towers, highlighting its purpose as a respite in its dense urban setting.

Other winners include Larry Goodwin, who took the Best Interior Detail award for his photo of the ornate elevators in Denver’s historic Sugar Building; and Alex Gamble, who won the Best Detail prize for his up-close take on the Denver Public Library downtown.

There are other notable shots of Denver landmarks, both new and old, in the 30 finalists that juror Florio chose from 286 entries. All can be seen on the websites of either the Architecture Foundation (denverarchitecture.org) or the Colorado Photographic Arts Center (cpacphoto.org).

Among the more notable: Michael Frankenfield’s photo of the Eviva Apartments on 13th Street, which juxtaposes traditional downtown Denver houses against one of the neighborhood’s newest residential towers.

Another: Frankenfield’s detail shot of the eyeball-like windows on the new Populous Building on Colfax Avenue downtown. Expect more shots of this photogenic structure, meant to resemble an aspen tree, in future Y/OUR Denver competitions.

That’s actually why this contest works, and why fans of the event look forward to seeing the results each year. The photos feel familiar — nearly all of them feature buildings Denverites encounter with great frequency. But they invite us to consider them in new ways, to appreciate what they bring to street corners and the skyline, how they lift up the lives of the people who use them or who see them as part of their daily routine. They ask us not to take our city for granted,

On the surface, this contest is about honoring great design and photography, but underneath it honors the city itself. Most importantly, it provides inspiration for everyone — architects, planners, neighborhood groups, building inspectors, concerned citizens and anyone else who gatekeeps the development of the city — to support the creation of better design in the future.

Ray Mark Rinaldi is a Denver-based freelance writer specializing in fine arts.