Lifestyle Photographers Contest Judges

Bill Frakes

Bill Frakes is a photographer and filmmaker has worked in more than 138 countries for a wide variety of editorial and advertising clients. His advertising clients include Nike, Coca-Cola, Champion, Isleworth, Stryker, IBM, Nikon, Kodak, and Reebok. Editorially, his work has appeared in virtually every major general interest publication in the world. Bill won the coveted Newspaper Photographer of the Year award in the prestigious Pictures of the Year competition. He was a member of the Miami Herald staff that won the Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of Hurricane Andrew. He has also been honored by the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards for reporting on the disadvantaged and by the Overseas Press club for distinguished foreign reporting. He was awarded the Gold Medal by World Press Photo.

Seth Resnick

Seth Resnick is one of North America's most prolific corporate, editorial and stock photographers. Seth is greatly in demand for his beautiful graphic images in both natural and created light. Resnick has been published in the world's most prestigious magazines. His credits include over 2,500 publications worldwide and his clients constitute a virtual list of Corporate America.

He is co-founder of D-65, an organization teaching digital workflow workshops. Resnick is at the forefront of digital innovation working with Adobe, Canon, Xrite, Epson and others to help them formulate more useful products for photographers. He is a member of the prestigious Canon Explorer of Light program as well as an Alpha/Beta and feature consultant for Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom.

He travels extensively presenting the various aspects of photography and is also the former Founding President of Editorial Photographers, a trade organization dedicated to the promotion of sound business practices for editorial photography. Seth is also a partner of PixelGenius developing Photoshop plug-ins and software and a regular contributing columnist to a variety of trade publications.

Mary Vignoles

Mary Vignoles is a freelance picture editor based in Oregon. In 16 years as an award-winning professional picture editor, she assisted numerous staff photographers in elevating the quality of their work. While at the Los Angeles Times, she coordinated major projects and weekend coverage, and worked on national and international stories as well as significant social issues and timely local stories. Her interest in video has helped photographers translate still imagery into storytelling videos.

Renée C. Byer

Renée C. Byer is an award-winning documentary photojournalist and Emmy nominated multimedia field producer best known for her in-depth work focusing on the disadvantaged and those who otherwise would not be heard. Her ability to produce photographs with profound emotional resonance and sensitivity earned her the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography in 2007 and dozens of national and international honors, including the World Understanding Award from Pictures of the Year International, and Pulitzer Finalist in 2013.

Known for her ability to translate stark statistics into images that connect us to our humanity, she has traveled throughout Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America, covering some of the most important issues of our time. Byer’s stories have deepened our understanding of the environment, climate change, extreme poverty, genetically modified food, healthcare, women at war, domestic violence, and the drought and economic crisis in California. In 2016 the Sacramento Bee published a 20-page special section, "No Safe Place," featuring her images chronicling the plight of Afghan SIV's as they struggle in the U.S., facing poverty and violence.

Byer’s internationally acclaimed book, Living on a Dollar a Day: The Lives and Faces of the World’s Poor, illuminates the stories of people living on the brink of survival, and invites you to put an end to extreme poverty. The book won First Place Documentary Book from the International Photography Awards in 2014. Byer narrates a documentary about the project that was released in 2016.

View Renée C. Byer's feature on CBS Sunday Morning.

Also a picture editor and designer, Byer is represented by Zuma Press photo agency. Byer's photos have been published in Newsweek Asia, Paris Match, Marie Claire, El Mundo, Days Japan, Rangefinder, Photo District News, Business Week and most recently in View magazine in Germany. She has taught workshops and had gallery shows in San Francisco, California, Palm Beach, Florida, Yokohama, Japan, Siem Reap, Cambodia and Madrid, Spain. Her pictures titled "Seeds of Doubt," won the Harry Chapin Award for Photojournalism 2005 and she is also the recipient of the Associated Press News Executives Council, Mark Twain Award 2004. She was a finalist for a Dart award for victims of violence before coming to the Sacramento Bee 2003. Her numerous awards include honors from NPPA, POYi, AP, SND, Best of the West and regional contests in photography, picture editing and design.

Tom Reese

Tom Reese’s work as a newspaper and magazine photojournalist has been nominated for Pulitzer Prizes in Breaking News Photography, Feature Photography and Explanatory Reporting during his career at The Seattle Times. Currently he is an independent photographer, editor and teacher in Seattle, Washington. His recent books and projects focus on the complex relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world.

He has been recognized with multiple honors from World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, Best of Photojournalism, The Associated Press, Society of Newspaper Design, the United Nations Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, International Conservation Photography Awards and others.

Among his published photography:

"Once and Future River: Reclaiming the Duwamish" about the damaged landscape of Seattle's Duwamish River;

"Last Oasis: Revisiting Union Bay," exploring the relationships between people and the rest of the natural world in Seattle's Union Bay;

"A Land of War, A Journey of the Heart," about human rights in Burma, a project resulting in a newspaper special section and international attention, including at the United Nations.

Reese has also been recognized for his work as a reporter, picture editor and page designer. Newspaper staff work includes The Seattle Times; The Herald in Everett, Washington; the Kansas City (Missouri) Times; and the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune.

Preston Gannaway

Preston Gannaway (b. 1977) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning documentary photographer and artist. Her work often focuses on intimate stories about American families and marginalized communities while addressing themes such as gender identity, class and our relationship to the natural world. The story she did on the St. Pierre family, Remember Me, was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography. She is a regular lecturer and has served as guest faculty in a variety of educational workshops. Her photographs are held in both public and private collections and have been exhibited widely. Her first book, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, about the changing character of a seaside neighborhood in Virginia, was released in 2014. Born and raised in North Carolina, she is now based in Oakland, California.

Peter Power

Peter Power is a Toronto-based award-winning professional photographer with an emphasis on editorial and corporate portraits and story-telling.

With a wealth of carefully cultivated experience that draws on three decades of work in Canada and abroad, Power is widely considered among the top visual story-tellers in Canada with photography and journalism skills honed from years of assignments photographing everything from business leaders to revolutionaries. His corporate and commercial work has grown steadily with creative, well-produced and consistently high quality location photography while he continues to provide editorial clients with the highest standard of images and video.

The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, The Canadian Press, Canadian Geographic, the CBC, CAMH Foundation, Maclean's, Reuters, PostMedia, National Post, OurKids Media, Communitech, Clothesline Media, Appleby College, and NOMA Event Design are among Power's list of clients. He also works as a photography instructor at two community colleges in Ontario, and shares his experience and knowledge through instructional workshops and speaking engagements.

Power has been named the Photographer of the Year five times, has won four Canadian National Newspaper Awards (nominated nine times) and has won the prestigious Governor General's Michener Award for Public Service Journalism. His work has been recognized many times by the National Press Photographer's Association (NPPA), News Photographer's Association of Canada (NPAC), Pictures of the Year International (POYi), the Society of Newspaper Design (SND) among others. His multimedia work has been recognized internationally as a Webby Award Honoree three times, a Webby Award Finalist once, a POYi winner, and a NPAC POY winner.

Jeanie Adams-Smith

Jeanie Adams-Smith left the Chicago Tribune in 2002 to take a position at Western Kentucky University where she has shared her expertise with students in one of the nation’s premier photojournalism schools.

Her 10-year career at the Tribune culminated with her in the position of national/foreign picture editor during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, which forever changed America. By then, Adams-Smith had already published a photo-documentary book on minor league baseball and a multimedia piece on the children of divorce that won first place in Pictures of the Year International.

Since arriving at WKU, Adams-Smith published two more books of social documentary photography and was named 2006 Photographer of the Year by the Kentucky News Photographers Association. The university nominated her book, Survivors: The Children of Divorce, the culmination of six years of work, for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction.

Adams-Smith has also won international awards for photography documenting women’s health clinics in Chicago neighborhoods, Vanderbilt University’s burn unit for children, a family’s struggle with traumatic brain injury, and a photographic testimonial by survivors of rape and sexual assault in Kentucky.

In the past several years, she has traveled twice to Cuba, documenting the everyday lives of people in Old Havana, a World Heritage Site as yet untouched by international commerce. She has also been to western Ireland to document family farms threatened by industrial agriculture. The work has won her several regional and national awards. She recently returned from England where she taught at Harlaxton College for a semester and worked on a project on family farms in Europe.

Janet Jarman

Janet Jarman works as a photojournalist and filmmaker based in Mexico, where she documents issues such as immigration and public health issues, water resource problems and solutions, Mexico’s vibrant traditions and the region's ongoing security issues.

Jarman’s work has been published in The New York Times, GEO, Smithsonian Magazine, The Washington Post, Stern, Der Spiegel, 6Mois, The Wall Street Journal, amongst others. She has also worked for international foundations such as The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Open Society Institute, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Ashoka; Innovators for the Public. Her photographs have been featured at Visa Pour l’Image, Perpignan and have received awards in Pictures of the Year International, American Photography, PDN Photography Annual, POY Latam, Latin American Fotografia, Communication Arts, and Best of Photojournalism.

She produced Pictures of the Year Latin America 2015 (POY Latam), which was judged in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and she judged the prestigious Pictures of the Year International photojournalism contest in February 2016. She also recently received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation to produce a feature-length documentary film in Mexico.

In addition to working on editorial assignments for magazines and newspapers, Jarman has produced various long-term photo and multimedia projects, including Marisol and the American Dream, a two-decade story that chronicles the life of one Mexican immigrant girl; Aguas Negras, which analyzes Mexico’s many water-related challenges, and Born In Chiapas, about traditional midwives in Mexico.

Jarman began her career in South Florida after graduating from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She worked as a staff photographer at The Miami Herald, and later obtained a master’s degree in environmental issues at the University of London. She is represented by Redux Pictures.

Michael Ainsworth

Michael Ainsworth is a former staff photographer at The Dallas Morning News. A graduate of The University of Texas at Arlington, with a degree in journalism, he has won awards for his coverage of spot news and sports. He was one of the staffers at the DMN who were honored to receive the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for their coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. He is presently a photo editor for Panini America and also freelances.