Awards:

• An esteemed panel of industry professionals selects five photographers per round of competition as the 2011 Hot Shots. From these Hot Shots, one image maker will be selected by Jen Bekman Projects to win the grand prize of $10,000, in addition to the hallmark awards that are offered. 
• The grand prize recipient is also awarded: 
  • A solo exhibition at Jen Bekman Gallery
  • Representation from Jen Bekman Gallery for two years, commencing with his/her selection 
• And EACH Hot Shot earns: 
  • A $500 honorarium
  • Participation in the 2012 Hot Shot Exhibition at Jen Bekman Gallery 
  • The opportunity to release an edition on 20×200 
• Additionally, ALL entrants are reviewed for participation in 20×200 (www.20×200.com), have the chance to be featured as a Contender on the Hey, Hot Shot! blog and receive ample opportunity for online exposure on Facebook, Flickr and Twitter.

The judges are: Jen Bekman, CEO and Founder of JBP; Jeffrey Teuton, Associate Director of Jen Bekman Gallery; and Sara Distin, Group Director of Curation and Content for 20×200

How to enter this photo contest

Great prizes, eminent judges, supporting charity. Win over £5,000 worth of prizes by entering the Renaissance Prize now!

Take a look at Photocompete Facebook page. You will find more photography contests and competitions there! Join Photocompete on Twitter.

I woke up this morning thinking...there's some sort of sporting contest on today. Indy race? Horse race? The Masters?

Oh yeah. That.

I think I should just watch a tape of last year's. I'd know how it ends, but that would be a good thing.

Meanwhile, a significant number of TOP readers (roughly 40%) aren't from here. If yer furrin and curious as to why this is a big day for those strange Murkins*, this year you can watch the Super Bowl online. Just thought I'd mention it.

Kickoff is 6:30 USA Eastern Time, give or take. (Indiana, where I was born, is weird when it comes to time. Apparently, different communities decide what time zone they want to be in. Indianapolis is in the Eastern time zone, but there are patches of the State in both the northwest and southwest that are in the Central zone. Every few years they make noises about integrating the entire State in one time zone, but nothing ever comes of it.)

This isn't a TOP post, by the way, so please pretend it isn't here. We've been getting some blowback recently for having too many off-topic posts, and we're determined to renew our vows with our first love in the weeks to come. Speaking of which, don't you think it's about time for Round Two of the Reader Print Offer contest? (Note: Do not submit yet!!)

The standard line with the Super Bowl is that the hype is everything and the game itself is a letdown, but the last time these two teams met, the underdog Giants spoiled the Patriots' perfect season and experts agree it was one of the best Super Bowls ever played. That's why they're calling this one "The Rematch." Fans actually have hopes of a decent game to watch along with all the commercials.

In the Consolation Prize Dept. for Yr. Hmbl. Ed. and the rest of us cheeseheads from 'Sconsin, Aaron Rodgers walked away with the NFL Most Valuable Player Award last night. He was graceful and modest except for another dig at the 49ers (he's still resentful that they drafted Alex Smith instead of him).

And if you're wondering, the switchover to Lion these past few days went...okay. It was my worst-ever experience with an Apple upgrade, but that's still not very bad. (I still can't get Exposé to work, though.) The switchover to the Airport didn't go so well, but that's on me. Did you know that one reason I got into photography was that I knew I wasn't good with computers? True story. You know what they say: "Oh well."

Enjoy the game, wherever you are. There won't be any posts here today, but we'll be back tomorrow.

Mike

*People who live in Murka.

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Although they're different for each of us, I would guess that everybody has those dreaded "photographers you're supposed to like." You know, famous photographers whom everybody admires but who for some reason just don't grab you. I can think of a few who are that way for me. No names, now—let's be polite: there's no point in slagging off someone by name whose work someone else might love.

But then we have the opposite: guilty pleasures. Stuff you just lap up happily whenever you come across it and that just hits the spot for you.

I visited a bookstore far from home the other day and came across a new book that I just had to peruse, even though I ought to have been in browsing mode. The book has a lot of problems. It's called A Year in Photography: Magnum Archive.

A year? I assumed that meant they were surveying the best photography of a certain year. Which year? It doesn't say on the cover. Which bugged me. So I picked it up. And the first photograph I flipped to was dated 1978.

And the second one, 1954.

What the hell?

It actually took the small brain a while to figure out the concept the publishers were going for. The clue: there are 365 pictures in the book. Yeah—really—it's one of those calendar books, like the ones that give you an inspiring hokey fortune-cookie quotation to help you face every new morning, or a different cat cartoon to start each day off with a smile. (Who buys crap like that? Whoops, I said no slagging off.) Each picture is associated with a day of the year.

Pointless. It's just an excuse for publishing a stack of pictures.

Magnum, as in Champagne
But ahhh, what pictures. Magnum is the photographer's photo agency, started by photographers, for photographers. And named for the famous jumbo size of Champagne bottle. Yes, it was (and is) intended to make money, but its members had (and have) unprecedented freedom to follow their own stories and shoot the kinds of pictures they like, in the style that comes most naturally to them. Here, in somewhat plainspoken semi-matte one-picture-per-page reproduction that democratizes each picture relative to the others (and that I like quite a bit), are 365 great Magnum photographs. Many great masterpieces you will recognize, but many very fine pictures you will not. Verticals are not shortchanged, because the book is square; and there's not a single picture disfigured by being spilled across the gutter (good thing, too, because in a book this thick the gutter gets pretty prominent).

Oops splat! Three stars out of five. But the shortcomings are
the publisher's, not the fault of the pictures.

And here we come to the second conceptual shortcoming. Books of Magnum "greatest hits" really don't make a lot of sense, because one of the stated principles of Magnum from the beginning was to allow the photographers control of the context in which the pictures were presented; no more slash-and-burn by editors willing to cut out the visual heart of a picture story or disorder its flow, no more cropping ruthlessly and crippling a composition to fit a layout or a page. Not that Magnum was ever really able to insist on such lofty objectives consistently. But still...here we get pictures pulled completely out of their original contexts, presented without story or background. I happen to know the stories behind a lot of these pictures, and they're important. They amplify the meaning and the impact of the photographs. But they're just not here. It's not just that this isn't the best way to see photographs...it's that it's specifically contrary to the spirit of Magnum. You don't even get simple captions except in the back of the book.

So...these are just pictures. One after the other, without emphasis, with no context or rhyme or reason.

So the book shouldn't even be recommendable, let alone so entrancingly pleasing. Because, really, this is a fair sampling of simply the best that the medium of photography has to offer. Bon bons they may be, plucked thus out of context and divorced from explication. But if you simply like looking at photographs (which I very much do), then this book actually is what all such books claim or pretend to be: a treasury. I literally had to sit down and take three quarters of an hour to slowly look at every page.

"So okay," as David Vestal is wont to say: not recommended.

...And yet recommended, as a guilty pleasure, if your guilty pleasures bear any resemblance to mine.

Mike

P.S. This title goes into much the same category as Photographers A–Z or Photo:Box (the links are to our reviews)—educational rather than original—albeit with the above caveats about the absence of commentary.

P.S. Here's the U.K. link , and the one from The Book Depository. The U.S. link is above, in the third paragraph.

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Roger Overall: "I'm currently working my way through this book. Every day, I study that day's photograph to see what I can learn from it. If the photographer is unknown to me, I research them. Gradually, in 15-minute blocks at bedtime, my knowledge of photography is growing.

"You've highlighted one of the things I dislike about the book. The photographs are presented without context. I think that diminishes them. In some cases, I struggle to see any merit in them at all. Sacrilege, I know, but a good few of the selected photographs are empty of story or artistic intent. As a book that makes forces you to learn by using your own initiative to find out more about the photographs and their creators, it works. It stimulates. As a standalone work that encapsulates all the reader needs between its covers, it fails."

Featured Comment by Stefan: "Speaking about Magnum photographs, I have been spending the last few evenings reading through Magnum Contact Sheets. Absolutely magnificent and surely a fitting complement to A Year in Photography: Magnum Archive.

Open Now is the Photo Factory’s annual open exhibition showcase.

There is no set theme and photographers are invited to submit personal work undertaken recently, of any subject, style or genre.

Exhibition:

• Open Now will be exhibited twice, once in Belfast (from 3rd – 24th May 2012) and once in Dublin.

Judges: Donovan Wylie (Magnum), Trish Lambe and Tanya Kiang (Gallery of Photography, Dublin).

Successful entrants will be notified by Friday 23rd  March 2012 and will be required to provide high quality, unmounted archival prints, 24 inches on the longest side (to include a two inch white border).

How to enter this photo contest

Great prizes, eminent judges, supporting charity. Win over £5,000 worth of prizes by entering the Renaissance Prize now!

Take a look at Photocompete Facebook page. You will find more photography contests and competitions there! Join Photocompete on Twitter.

Are High Dynamic Range photos appropriate for illustrating news? That's the debate that's been started by the Washington Post's use of an HDR image on its front page in January. Sean Elliot, president of the National Press Photographers Association came down firmly against it, saying, 'HDR is not appropriate for documentary photojournalism.' John Omvik, Marketing VP with HDR software maker Unified Color understandably disagrees. He's written us a response arguing that what we see is closer to HDR than, say, a mono photo shot with Tri-X film.

You as a member can submit their work into a variety of themed competitions for a chance to win cash prizes and recognition for photographic excellence as voted on by the membership. Furthermore, each photographer’s submission entry fee will provide monetary assistance to the contests associated cause or organization.

Themes and awards:

• "Yellowstone National Park" - $500
• “"Bicycles" - $500
• “Our Rivers” - $455

How to enter this photo contest

Great prizes, eminent judges, supporting charity. Win over £5,000 worth of prizes by entering the Renaissance Prize now!

Take a look at Photocompete Facebook page. You will find more photography contests and competitions there! Join Photocompete on Twitter.

Kenko-Tokina has added the mirrors back into mirrorless with the launch of an ultra-compact Reflex 300mm F6.3 for Micro Four Thirds. This fixed-aperture, manual focus lens revives the catadioptric lens design that was especially popular in the 1970s and '80s for producing small high-magnification telephoto lenses. With a 55mm filter diameter and weight less than 300g, this is possibly the smallest lens of this type that's ever been made for stills cameras. The spec is rounded-off with a minimum focus of 0.8m and 0.5x maximum magnification, making the lens potentially interesting for chasing insects and the like, just as long as you can hold it steadily enough.