Inaugural 2010 International Pano Awards Celebrates the Art of Panoramic Photography
The inaugural 2010 EPSON International Pano Awards is dedicated to the art of panoramic photography. Advances in digital photography and software such as PTGui and Adobe Photoshop has resulted in an explosion in the popularity of image stitching, especially in the panoramic format. Panoramic film photography also remains alive and well. The Pano Awards aims to showcase the work of panoramic photographers worldwide and be the largest and most important competition for panoramic photography.
The Inaugural 2010 EPSON International Pano Awards is accepting submissions until 30th April 2010.
Details of the competition can be found on their website.
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Tweet ThisCall for Entries: PDN Photo Annual 2010
The Power of Photography
Photographers are invited to submit their most compelling, provocative and emotional work to this year’s PDN Photo Annual. The competition is open photographers worldwide, with categories in Advertising, Corporate, Portraiture, Photojournalism, Photo Books, Sports, Documentary, and Stock Photography. The awards ceremony will take place in 2010 in New York.
With a prize total of over $20,000 and a solo exhibition, the competition is going to be pretty stiff!
Deadline: December 21, 2009
Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,Environmental Photographer of the Year 2009
The UK newspaperThe Daily Telegraph has posted an image gallery from the CIWEM 2009 Environmental Photographer of the Year contest.
Moldovan photographer, Bolucevschi Vitali, has won the CIWEM Environmental Photographer of the Year 2009 competition. His picture, Talking About Stars, won the ‘Natural World’ category.
Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,Fair Pay for Freelance Photographers
To achieve an income comparable to a staff journalist on £25,000 ($41,600) a year, freelance journalists should be paid £285 ($475) for a day’s work, according to the 2009 Freelance Ready Reckoner.
The annual guide to the real cost of freelance work has been produced by UK freelancer Andrew Bibby. It provides day rates for freelances working from their own premises. The pay comparison table uses a range of publicly available data to calculate the real cost to employers of employing staff.
As well as a guide to what freelances should be paid, the 2009 Ready Reckoner shows how badly employers exploit cheap freelance work.
Full details at www.andrewbibby.com
You can download a pdf copy of the 2009 Ready Reckoner here.
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(Image © Thierry Legault, 2009)
Transit of the space shuttle Atlantis taken from the vicinity of Kennedy Space Centre on May 24th 2009. This image was taken 24 hours after the launch of Atlantis, at a distance of 260km above earth. The thin silhouette indicates the cargobay doors were open on its approach to the Hubble space telescope.
I would like to thank Thierry Legault for his kind permission to use his image in this blog post.
Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,NYPD advises officers that photography is not a crime
The New York Police Department have issued an operations order regarding the treatment of street photographers.
“Given the City’s prominence as a tourist destination, practically all photography will have no connection to terrorism or unlawful conduct. Since photography and/or videotaping is rarely unlawful, absent any other forms of criminality, an investigation of a report of suspicious photography or videotaping thought to be terrorism related is governed by [normal rules…]”
“Members of the service may not demand to view photographs taken by a person absent consent or exigent circumstances…”
The NPYD are to be commended for their common sense attitude towards press photographers and tourists.
This is in sharp contrast to that of London’s Metropolitan Police, who baton charged press photographers at the G20 protests in April this year and threatened them with arrest if they refused to leave the scene.
Source: Gallery Hopper
Other items of interest:
‘Authority’ paranoia over photography in London
An interesting short film about the legality of taking photographs on the streets in the UK. There’s a nice interaction between the photographer and two Police Community Support Officers in Central London.
You can’t photograph here
‘Authority’ paranoia over photography in London
An interesting short film about the legality of taking photographs on the streets in the UK. There’s a nice interaction between the photographer and two Police Community Support Officers in Central London.
For those who are unfimilar with CSO’s, these are not Police Officers. They are uniformed personnel working with the police in England and Wales. Their function is ‘…to provide a visible and reassuring presence on the streets and tackling the menace of anti-social behaviour.’
Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,A Global Portrait of People at Work
The Boston Globe has assembled a collection of 45 photographs showing people at work across the world. From the mundane to the spectacular, the collection, titled At Work, depicts people assembling, generating and buildings items both large and small.
Electric Time Co. employee Walter Rodriguez cleans the face of an 84-inch Wegman clock at the plant in Medfield, Mass. Thursday, Oct. 30, 2008. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)
Source: Boston.com
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The US photobook market is on track for healthy growth this year, with demand projected to reach nearly 17m units this year, up from close to 12.5m in 2008, according to a new US Photobook Market Report from Futuresource Consulting.
“The US photobook market is establishing itself as a significant contributor to industry revenues,” says Joanna Wright, Senior Market Analyst, Futuresource Consulting, “with our projections showing a market value of close to $540m US dollars by the end of 2009.
“Online remains the channel of choice for most consumers, accounting for 70% of volume last year. However, the retail element is growing strongly and will play its part in further developing the photobook segment and raising consumer awareness.”
With current and forthcoming product launches like the Kis photobook kiosk, duplex printing equipment from Kodak, Fuji and Noritsu, and a number of new software features from companies like Lucidium, HP, Rocketlife and DNP, there is now a growing emphasis on developing the retail angle.
A whole host of new players have entered the US market, with commercial print companies such as Rastar, RPI, CGX and others now accounting for around 40% of photobook production, compared to just 20% in Western Europe.
Source: Futuresource
Futuresource Consulting is a specialist research and knowledge-based consulting company. Futuresource provides its clients with expertise in consumer electronics, digital imaging, entertainment media, broadcast, optical manufacturing, storage media and IT.
Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,All the Cool Kids (and me): FotoWIRED now on Alltop
Alltop, the online news aggregation service, now features FotoWIRED.
While searching for information on photographic exhibitions in Ireland last week, I came across Alltop, a free news aggregation service. Alltop calls itself an ‘online magazine rack’ with news stories updated every hour. Alltop’s fuss-free approach to sharing information enables visitors to search anything from astronomy to zoology.
How do they do it? Quite simply really. They collect headlines from some of the best sites and blogs on the internet, import the top stories for any given topic and aggregate them into individual pages. These ‘topic’ pages display the headlines of the five most recent stories from each source. Visitors can search by topic, category or alphabetically.
Another neat feature Alltop offers bloggers is their embedable news widget. For a tech-illiterate like myself, cutting and pasting the html code is a snip (ugh!). Selecting and adding the code into a sidebar widget was easy, allowing me to feed the five most recent stories on photography straight onto my site.
Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,A Black Day for Copyright Law?
It seems Facebook’s Terms of Use have just taken a nose dive for the worse. A report on The Consumerist blog yesterday highlights a significant change in the terms governing usage rights of subscribers’ original content. Up until now, all rights to content uploaded by Facebook subscribers would expire when accounts were closed. As of now, it reads:
“You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.”
This in effect gives Facebook the right to do anything they like with your original content.
There are rules, even within the rights-managed and royalty-free systems of licensing images, which govern the way in which photographs can be used when published commercially or editorially. As any photographer with images available in stock libraries will tell you, the option to grant ‘an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully-paid, worldwide license’ for original material is unheard of.
While the professional photographer will check the terms and conditions carefully on stock image library websites before submitting their work, it is unlikely the general consumer will be fully aware of the implications of uploading their images to social media platforms like Facebook.
As if this wasn’t enough, earlier this morning avatars turned black on Twitter profiles across the world. This passive protest was against the introduction of a controvertial copyright law in New Zealand. In what is arguably the world’s harshest copyright enforcement law, anyone ‘accused’ of copyright infringement may find their internet connection disconnected.
Rather than protecting the interests of individual artists and content creators, argues Juha Saarinen on The Techsploder, the new law is there for the benefit of the large entertainment organizations.
(Facebook’s reply: blog.facebook.com)
Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,JPEG XR: Golden Fleece or Wet Blanket?
Next week, members of the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) will be meeting with camera manufacturers in Tokyo to begin finalising details of the new image compression format JPEG XR.
What began life as Microsoft’s HD Photo is now set to become another accepted standard for compressing digital images. JPEG XR, which stands for ‘extended range’, promises a wider range of tonal gradations and a richer colour palette than its predecessor. Designed to offer twice the quality of JPEG at the same compression rate, JPEG XR has stimulated debate over its viability within the photographic community (see Underexposed and Sitepoint).
While a JPEG XR image may look indistinguishable from a processed RAW file, it is unlikely to replace it as the photographer’s preferred format. What it will offer, however, is the option to retouch processed images more effectively with less degradation than its predecessor.
The committee expects the new JPEG XR International Standard (IS) to be published later this year.
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[Image: From the series Cloud Projections by Blake Gordon].
Imagine the scene… It’s the middle of summer 2011and you are walking through Manhatten with friends. All the lights midtown begin to switch off, one by one. Your hear music. Noises rumble above the tops of buildings. You wonder if it’s some cheesy downtown club opening up, or maybe it’s the long predicted apocalypse. But then, projected from some kind of mega-projector, Ghostbusters III appears above you in the clouds. It’s the world’s most talked about film premier: ghosts in the sky. And you are one of a million unticketed viewers in a new kind of philanthropy of the moving image.
This is just one flight of fancy (BLDGBLOG) inspired by a recent series of images created by photographer Blake Gordon.
Gordon has been documenting the geometric effects of light pollution in Austin, Texas, capturing thinly defined shapes in the clouds, projected upward from the tops of buildings. These accidental ornamentations of the night sky are what Gordon calls ‘Cloud Projections’. The pictures are very surreal, a little like something out of a SciFi movie.
In each one he has captured clearly defined patterns of light above a building. In order to do this the atmospheric conditions had to be just right.
Part of a larger interest in seeing clouds as a surface, Gordon has also produced images from a plane above Minnesota, where low winter clouds became a medium to project upon.
To think one day we could be walking through Manhatten, or any other city, and looking up into the night sky we see the latest blockbuster movie projected onto the clouds. What a child-like sense of awe and wonder that would bring to any film buff?
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If you want to see how President Obama’s inuguration looked from 423 miles up, take a look at this image taken by satellite yesterday.
GeoEye-1 took this satellite photo of Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony, Capitol Hill, Washington DC.
© 2009 GeoEye
A stunningly clear shot of crowds gathered along the Mall from Washington Monument to Capitol Building. The shot was taken by GeoEye-1, the world’s most powerful commercial colour imaging satellite. Taken from 423 miles in space, the image was taken over Washington DC as the satellite moved from north to south along the eastern seaboard of the United States. Travelling at 17,000 miles per hour (that’s about 4 miles a second) the satellite was able to capture objects as small as 16 inches in size.
For a closer look, click on the image and zoom in. See anyone you know?
GeoEye is making their imges available at no cost. You can download them from the Company’s website at www.geoeye.com under Featured Images.
Where you there? What it was like to be there on the day? Post a comment on your experience of the day.
Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,Iconic Vogue Photos for Sale
Lovers of classic black & white photography will be excited to hear about ten limited edition photos on display next month in the main lobby of Condé Nast headquarters in New York.
The images include Edward Steinchen’s classic photo of actress Mary Heberden, Anthony Armstrong-Jones’ portrait of Vanessa Regrave on the film set of Blowup, portraits of Cher and model Marisa Berenson by Arnaud De Rosnay, and fashion shots from Patrick Demarchelier and Toni Frissell. Vogue is selling just ten limited-edition art prints of each image. Each print will be hand numbered and stamped with the VOGUE Archive Collection logo, and accompanied by a letter of authenticity. Don’t know about you, but I guess they will be priced beyond my pocket! You can see the collection at the Condè Nast site.
In The News: ‘iPhoto Update Helps Show Merits of Geotagging’
Story Highlights:
- Software marries photos with location data taken from a separate GPS receiver.
- Apple’s iPhone can geotag its own photos.
- Geotagging lets you search for photos based on where you took them.
- Manufacturers say GPS support in digital cameras has become a matter of when, not if.
See full article: ‘iPhoto Update Helps Show Merits of Geotagging’
Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,In The News: ‘Daily Snapshots on CNN’
NIKON FOCUSES ON ‘DAILY SNAPSHOTS’ IN NEW CAMPAIGN ON CNN
Unique, intriguing photographs from around the world form the basis for Nikon’s new online advertising campaign on CNN, to promote their ‘COOLPIX’ range of cameras. ‘The Daily Snapshot’ appears on the homepage of the international news network’s website inviting viewers to see a pop up gallery of images documenting both the news agenda and everyday life.
‘The Daily Snapshot’ images are selected by CNN editors from a number of news agencies, while the online component of the campaign also features video banner rotations to drive traffic to Nikon’s international imaging website
.
Take a look. Go to CNN
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