Judges

Greg Gibson

When it comes to photojournalism, Greg Gibson has seen it, done it, and been there. His 20 year career encompasses hundreds of national and international stories while working for some of the largest news organizations in the world.

Name any major newspaper or magazine...Greg's been published in it. His assignments have included 3 Presidential campaigns, daily coverage of the White House, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Gulf War, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and hundreds of major sporting events including the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the NCAA Basketball Tournament, and The Masters. His travels have taken him to all 50 states and nearly every major city in the world. Throughout his career Greg Gibson has been known as a photographer who consistently delivers photographic excellence from any situation. In 1993 Greg and a small group of his AP colleagues were awarded the highest honor in journalism, The Pulitzer Prize, for coverage of the 1992 Presidential Campaign. In 1999, Greg joined an even more select group of photographers when he was awarded a share of a second Pulitzer Prize, this time for coverage of President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

In 2000, after 15 years of competing at the highest levels of journalism, Greg left the AP on sabbatical. Given an opportunity to re-acquaint himself with his wife and children, he made the decision to pursue a career in photography that is less invasive and demanding of his family. Now he has turned his cameras towards documenting special days and events in the lives of families throughout the Washington area.

Anna Kuperberg

Anna Kuperberg is a San Francisco based wedding and family photographer. She was named "one of the world's top ten wedding photographers" by American Photo magazine and her work has appeared in Real Simple, Martha Stewart Weddings, InStyle, and People.

From 1991-2004 Anna also worked as a freelance editorial photographer. Her documentary work was featured in a solo show at the St Louis Art Museum in 2004, and is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The St Louis Art Museum, and the Portland Art Museum.

Matt Mendelsohn

In his twenty-three years as a photographer, Matt has covered the White House, crawled around in Egyptian tombs, and photographed celebrities like Jennifer Anniston and Nicole Kidman. He's been the director of photography of a 27 million circulation weekly, the photo editor of the news section of the nation's largest newspaper, and has photographed some 450 weddings in the last decade. Matt worked for the United Press International. There, he covered the White House, the invasion of Panama and the fist Gulf War.

Matt moved from UPI to USA Today, shooting everything from celebrity profiles to earthquakes to sporting events. He was promoted to Director of Photography of USA Weekend magazine.

In 2001, Matt's brother, Daniel, called with an interesting proposal: join him on a trip back to the family home in Ukraine and unravel a 60-year-old mystery. That project led to a five-year search, from Sydney to Stockholm, a quest that was documented in the award-winning and best-selling memoir The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million.

As a wedding photographer, "Photo District News" included Matt in its "15 hottest wedding portfolios in America" issue and Washingtonian Magazine described his portraits as "a breed apart." The cover story he wrote in 2006 for the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, about his life as a wedding photographer, has become a widely reproduced and emailed internet sensation. Matt lives with his wife, Maya, and daughter, Alexandra in Virginia.

Jen Sens

Jen Sens and her husband, Eric Larson, are the photographers behind Jensen Larson Photography, based seasonally in Florida and Colorado. Larson was honored with a first place World Press award in 2000 while a staff photographer at the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel.

Sens was honored as Silver, College Photographer of the Year Portfolio in 2002 while in graduate school in Mass Communication at the University of Florida. The pair have been working together photographing editorially and commercially since 2003 in locations across the United States and in places as diverse as China, Ireland and Spain. With a focus on location portraiture, travel and golf, they trace their photographic heritage to their years as newspaper photojournalists.

Today their main editorial clients are Golf Digest, People Magazine and Kiplinger's Personal Finance. Commercially, their primary clients are Mercedes-Benz USA, Adventures by Disney and the Discovery Channel.

They were married in 2007 and enjoy documenting a handfull of weddings annually.

Emilie Sommer

Roots founder Emilie Sommer began her professional editorial career with two summer internships at the Cape Cod Times documenting the goings-on of the enchanting villages of the island and its residents, as well as major national news covering the tragic plane crash of JFK Jr. and President Clinton's vacations on Martha's Vineyard. After earning a degree in photojournalism from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University, Emilie worked for USA Today and The Washington Post in Washington, DC, as a photographer and photo editor.

Currently a wedding photojournalist and freelance photographer, Emilie is based in Portland, Maine. Emilie has also founded the national News Wedding Photographers online directory of wedding photojournalists and the Pink Initative, a non-profit for wedding professionals who donate to breast cancer research.