Beautiful new website design needed for EarthShots.org

Earth Shots - http://www.earthshots.org

I am a photographer who runs a variety of photography related websites. If this project goes well then there is scope for further work in the future.

I am aiming to make Earth Shots a highly prestigious online photography contests appealing to professional nature and travel photographers around the world.

Earth Shots was established almost 4 years ago and in this time has featured some incredible photographs. The site has attracted over 5 million visitors but is now in need of a more professional design to help take it to the next level.

I am targeting enthusiast and professional photographers and people who enjoy seeing inspiring travel and nature photography (i.e. a similar demographic to National Geographic). I want photographers to feel that winning photo of the day on Earth Shots is highly prestigious (almost like appearing on the pages of National Geographic magazine) and a good way for them to get their work in front of a large audience.

The primary focus of the site needs to be:
1. Giving the photos maximum impact.
2. Leading people to subscribe to our feeds, email, twitter & facebook page.
3. Generating advertising revenue in order to fund prizes.
4. Encouraging photographers to submit their photographs to the contest.

Earth Shots is built on Wordpress. Essentially each photo of the day is like a new wordpress blog post. Please look at http://www.earthshots.org/ to get a feel for the current site.

Specific requirements:
- I want prominent subscription options to a daily feed via rss & email, a weekly feed via rss & email plus "follow us on twitter" and "like our facebook page" on the homepage and photo view pages.
- I need areas for placing adverts, I was thinking a 728x90 banner at the top and a sidebar that is wide enough to take a 300px or 336px wide ad in the future.
- I would like the total theme width to be 990px wide.
- I am looking for a homepage design that shows the current photo of the day and around a week’s worth of recent winners.
- On the individual post pages I want sharing links for twitter, facebook and stumble upon. I also want thumbnails showing winning photos “on this day” in previous years. Plus post pages need to show a photo caption, photographer information and comments.
- I would like the archive pages redesigned perhaps with a calendar format for showing previous winning photos.