Winners of the 2016 Epson/NZIPP Iris Professional Photography Awards

Judging of this year’s Epson / New Zealand Institute of Professional Photographers (NZIPP) Iris Professional Photography Awards commenced on June 16, and continued over three days to a packed audience, with the winners announced at the annual Awards Gala Dinner on Monday, June 20. This year’s overall winner of the NZ Professional Photographer of the Year award was Katherine Williams (see photo), who also took out the top honours in both the Wedding Classic and Wedding Creative categories. 

The D-Photo–sponsored category of Portrait Creative was won by Marama Shearer, the Wildlife and Wild Places category was won by Steve Hussey, the Travel category was taken out by Mike Hollman, and the Portrait Classic category was won by Susie Whelan. Top honours in other categories included Thomas Busby as the winner of the Landscape category, Harry Janssen as winner of the Illustrative category, Melissa Waite was the winner of the Documentary category, the Creative category was taken out by Catherine Cattanach, and the Commercial category winner was won by Amber Griffin. The winners of the two other main awards were Lisa Saad, who took out the International Photographer of the Year, and Ilan Wittenberg, won the award for the Highest-Scoring Print.

See a gallery of the category-winning images below: