2008 Punctum Day Award Winners

The 2008 Punctum Day Award winners were selected for their outstanding quality and artistic merit in each of the five categories: Photo, Vector, Video, Flash and Design. Each of the Punctum Day Award winners in these five categories won $5,000 USD.

The 50 finalists for five of the categories were selected from over one million photos, vectors, videos, Flash files, and design submissions newly uploaded. The judging panel selecting the winners included Warren Cook, creative director with Jamison Advertising Group based in San Diego, California, Sandra Castanha, creative director at Ferrier Pearce, a creative design agency based in Surrey, United Kingdom, and Brad Hochberg, co-director and president of award winning The Refinery, based in Burbank, California.

Thanks to everyone who voted for the 2008 Punctum Day Awards and congratulations to the winners! The winning contributors were:

Punctum Day Inspector’s Choice Awards:

In addition to the Punctum Day Awards given to five contributors in five different categories, we asked our dedicated, international Inspection team to vote for two other contributors who deserve some recognition and rewards. Here are the winners of the Inspector’s Choice Awards:

Most Deserving of a New Camera

danishkhan (Pakistan) won a Canon EOS 5D with EF 24-105 L IS

Danish's images are always a pleasure to inspect. He has an incredible ability to capture the subtle nuances in the world around him with style and grace. The inspection team is very happy to award him Most Deserving of a New Camera and look forward to seeing his portfolio grow even further with his new equipment. Congratulations!

Most Improved Contributor

viridian1 (United States) won $5,000

Let's not kid ourselves... Ronnie was already a formidable talent when he joined the site a couple of years ago. My, what a difference two years can make! He's moved away from his cute (but somewhat flat) cartoon characters, and graduated fully into brilliant 3-dimensional vectors so full of depth and color that it makes you want to stroke your computer monitor. We're thrilled to recognize Ronnie's meteoric growth as a contributor here on iStock and award him the Punctum Award for Most Improved Contributor, 2008. Congratulations!

Hall of Fame:

iStockphoto’s Hall of Fame was introduced in 2007 and Lise Gagné was the first inductee for her loyalty and amazing feat of reaching 500,000 downloads. iStock Hall of Fame inductees are selected by the secretive Punctum Elder Council. Hall of Fame inductees are members who have left an indelible stamp on the history of iStock.

Hidesy Amanda Rohde, Black Diamond Contributor (Australia)

The reason Hidesy is in the iStock Hall of Fame is all around you. No matter what city or country you live in: it’s on your dinner menu and the billboard in your bus shelter and probably every other ad in your telephone directory. It’s that Australian sunshine that Amanda Rohde captures so perfectly. Hidesy is the blueprint of iStock success: a self-taught photographer who, through trial and error and a lot of rejected pictures at the beginning, changed the way the world looks. She made it brighter, crisper, and sexier. She’s an inspiration to tens of thousands of photographers.

Jester Aaron Springer, Chief Technical Officer, iStockphoto (Canada)

The designers at Evolvs.com were still tossing around the idea of giving away free stock photographs on the Internet when they brought in Bruce’s old pre-press mentor to be the first employee of iStockphoto. Jester was a recent graduate of the University of Calgary fine art department. He’d taught himself computer programming. And then, over the ensuing years, he built iStockphoto. Aaron has sunk more time and grief into the back end and architecture of iStock than anyone else: late nights, long hours, all with an unparalleled rigor and dedication. Now he leads a whole team of highly skilled developers and expert programmers. He’s guided iStock from a small experiment to an inspirational online world and international business success story.

Intransfer Brianna Wettlaufer, former V.P., Content Development (United States)

Intransfer wasn't satisfied with bell peppers and USB plugs. She wanted style, grace, sensuality, and beauty. Rather than just wait around, she made it happen herself. She took the iStock inspection team from a small, diffuse bunch to a well-trained, well-organized machine. She created and codified the quality standards that set iStock apart from the rest of the field. She demanded the best from us. She brought art direction and international flair to our photographer get-togethers, enough so that ‘get-together’ just didn't fit anymore and ‘iStockalypse’ became the name the world associates with first-rate training of developing stock photographers.

Build your own trophy

Since we know that every one of you is a winner, just for taking the brave step of selling your art on iStock, we have a present for you. We hope you get a kick out of making your own trophy with our rad Custom Trophy Kit.