Pictures of the Year Feature Photo Win

April 26, 2010 | Filed Under Contest | Leave a Comment 

I won second place, for the photo above,  in the Feature category in the News Photographers Association of Canada’s Pictures of the Year competition. Results were announced Saturday in Toronto. You can see all the winners at the NPAC site . The photo shows a young ballet student making a face at herself while doing stretching exercises before a class. The girl at left is her twin sister.  I’m not really a ‘cute kid’ photographer but they seem to win awards for me. Last year I placed in the Suburban Newspapers of America competition for the photo below of a young boy checking to make sure he was saluting correctly during a memorial service.

Learning Photography Online

July 24, 2009 | Filed Under Online Learning, Photography | Leave a Comment 

Students often ask where they can go to add to their knowledge when classes are done and many online sites are obvious recomendations. The past few weeks I’ve had the opportunity to revisit some favourite sites as well as take a look at some new offerings.

Lens Culture hosts a great site but I’ve never checked out their collection of audio interviews before. I really enjoyed the talk by Stephen Mayes on the World Press Photo contest. I actually found myself scribbling notes on a nearby envelope as the lecture unfolded. At 49 minutes it’s a long but very useful, thought provoking talk.

Yesterday checked out the just posted interview with Danny Wilcox Frazier at Brian Storm’s MediaStorm and still have to go back for the rest of the presentation on Wilcox Frazier’s Driftless.

Over at the Lenswork site where I haven’t been in ages I found a whole series (400) of short podcasts from Brooks Jensen. These are all quite short and while you won’t want to listen to every one (well, maybe you will) there are lots to choose from . I’d actually gone there because I’d just read elsewhere about the death in May of Bill Jay, whose work especially his portraits of photographers I’d always found quite fascinating (I actually published a series of them in my short lived photo paper Deadline, back in the mid-nineties). Jay had been a long time contributor to Lenswork. Look at Jay’s images and/or read his essays at his site here.

Youtube offers up a number pf presentations on photography. I’ve paricularily enjoyed the videos on Magnum photographers, an amzing view of  Bruce Gilden, focusing on his street photography techniques, and a nice interview by Michael David Murphy with Alec Soth.

Magnum Photos offers up essays and podocasts on their agency site. I really like Trent Parke’s Minutes To Midnight presentation and have watched it a number of times. Parke and his wife, the equally accomplished photographer Narelle Autio, spent two years traveling around their native Australia.

If you want a look at how some photographer’s set up their workspaces take a look at Andrew Hetherington’s What’s The Jackanory site for video tours of photographers’s studios.

Cameras On Display

September 6, 2008 | Filed Under Contest, Photography | Leave a Comment 

I helped judge the photo entries at the Sooke Fall Fair this morning. They had a display of old cameras in the room as well.