The Art of Bonsai Project

This thread is for discussing the feature gallery "Bonsai Today / Art of Bonsai Photo Contest - Judging Results"
http://www.artofbonsai.org/galleries/winners.php

Congratulations to the winners,nearwinners and
all participants.
The contest was filled with quality entries and I
enjoyed to see the works of very talented people.
Thank you also to AOB and Bonsai Today for making
it possible.
With my best wishes,
Dorothy Schmitz,Florida

Congratulations to all the winners and participants!
Nice specimens........and as Mike had said we must aim high to attain a certain level of standard. The accomplished artistes will of course keep influencing and motivating us with their wonderful work.....to create something of our own worth participating.
To Paul and the AoB guys..... since many near winners had lost by marginal points only, wouldn't it be nice to display their bonsai too, which will give us an opportunity to see their work too.
Another suggestion...........as the bonsai movement is spreading worldwide, can we know, from how many countries the 200+ entrees were from?
Shaukat

Shaukat,
Will Heath compiled some statistics about the contest and sent them my way.
We had 224 entries from 17 countries, with 28 entrants not specifying a country of origin. By country:
USA 106 entries
Germany 21 entries
Denmark 11 entries
Indonesia 8 entries
Czech Republic 7 entries
Brazil 7 entries
Australia 6 entries
India 5 entries
England 4 entries
Mexico 4 entries
Belgium 4 entries
Austria 4 entries
Portugal 3 entries
Italy 2 entries
Spain 2 entries
South Africa 1 entry
Puerto Rico 1 entry

This is a great turnout. Bonsai has become a truly worldwide art form, and I delight in the increasing internationalization of our own discussions of that art.
With my best regards,
Carl

Carl,
Thank you very much for putting up the pictures of the other entrants, which I really enjoyed seeing.
Your statistics on the participants from different countries was very helpful indeed. And I look forward to see entrees from additional countries next year. Thanks again for the inputs.
One question to the judges:
in the 'overall category', all the 3 winners were by Walter Pall whereas in the 'professional category' the 2nd place was Budi's Pemphis acidula and Walter's red Acer palmatum was 3rd. Is it by some mistake that Budi's tree was left out in the overall category? Would be happy to get the judges views on this point.
Regards,
Shaukat