Last year’s overall winner, “Fun Bathing” by Tan Choon Wee of Singapore

Photography competitions have stepped up in the last few years. No longer are they relegated to the select few, to the professionals with expensive equipment and years of framing, lighting and editing experience. Now they’re open to anyone with a digital camera and a knack for being in the right place and the right time.

One of the most well-known of these contests, the Digital Camera Photographer of the Year competition, sponsored by the U.K.’s Telegraph and the Royal Photographic Society, is currently underway and is expected to receive more than 120, 000 entries. Categories include World in Motion (”images that capture the moment and have a sense of drama”),  Black & White, Fashion, Man-Made (”aspects of our world that have been shaped by the hand of man”), People & Portraits, Planet Earth and the “anything goes” category, Digital Vision.

Organized by Britain’s largest photography magazine, Digital, the 2009 competition is free and open to photographers of any nationality. After today’s submission deadline (5pm GMT!), a team of judges will pick from the enormous amount of entries in all ten categories and will then tag an overall winner to receive the top prize of £10,000 ($16,000). The winning artist will also be declared Digital Photographer of the Year 2009.

Judges for the competition include such experts and luminaries as award-winning wildlife photographer Steve Bloom, the director of photography for news for Getty Images, Hugh Pinney, plus numerous editors and artists from major world-wide photography magazines.

So whether it’s that stunning portrait of Aunt Gracie everyone’s been complimenting you for, that fleeting snapshot you took of the falling leaf in Central Park or your brilliantly Photoshopped picture of the surf at daybreak, go and dig up your best shots and send them in to the planet’s biggest digital photography competition. Who knows, maybe you’ve got that one incredible image the world has been looking for.

Actress Jessica Alba in an ad for Calipari, before and after Photoshopping

In an effort to reduce the perceived effects models with unrealistic bodies have on young women who see them in ads, lawmakers in France and Great Britain are mulling a series of proposals that would require doctored advertisements to carry disclaimers.

According to Jo Swinson, one of the members of the British Parliament who is pushing for advertisement legislation, “when teenagers and women look at these pictures in magazines, they end up feeling unhappy with themselves.” France’s Valerie Boyer wants to take it one step further. For ads that fail to signify they’ve been retouched, she has proposed high fines – from $50,000 to half the price of the advertisement.

Of course, photo manipulation is nothing new. When the medium was developed 170 years ago there may not have been computer tools to change faces, but that didn’t stop people from trying. The first documented case goes all the way back to the 1860s, when a picture of Abraham Lincoln was altered with just ink, glue and scissors. Since then the ability to manipulate images has become almost an art form in itself. Most magazines now make ample use of cropping, air-brushing and Photoshopping to create images that are more-or-less completely different from their originals.

As image editing technology has risen in recent years, so have controversies. In an ad for the 2004 film King Arthur, actress Keira Knightley was given a chest bump by producers looking to increase sex appeal. Some ads even attempt to change skin color. In a photo for one of cosmetic giant L’oreal’s campaigns, singer Beyonce was famously “retouched” as a much paler, whiter version of herself.

Many critics, like Swinson and Boyer, claim this sort of retouching of female models in order to give them leaner bodies, clearer (or whiter) skin and bigger busts sets an unfair, unrealistic example for young women. This, they argue, can also lead to self-esteem disorders such as anorexia and bulimia.

However, airbrushing and other post-production techniques are so widely used and accepted in media that little is likely to change if legislation is passed. The question then becomes, if image-editing is indeed its own art from, what sort of responsibilities does it have to its viewers? In other words, should we really expect a photograph to tell the truth?

Brian May can do a whole lot more than just play the guitar. The 62 year-old British musician is most famously known for playing lead axe in the rock band Queen for almost 30 years, yet lately he’s been gaining a name for himself in other pursuits. Last year he earned a Ph.D in astrophysics, and now he’s co-authoring a book about 19th century photographer T.R. Williams, whom May believes is “the master” of the daguerreotype.

Entitled A Village Lost and Found, the book brings together the work of T.R. Williams’ pastoral photographs from the 1850s, originally collected in his Our Village series. The photos included in the book give a unique perspective into the lives of villagers at the time — a blacksmith at his forge, workers out in the field gathering harvest, men sharpening tools at the grindstone.

What makes the book especially interesting is that it includes a focusing stereoscope, an instrument designed by May himself which brings every picture into 3-D. Along with his co-author, photohistorian Elena Vidal, May also provides annotation and footnotes that help provide meaning to the individual stories depicted in each photograph. This creates a “powerfully atmospheric and touching set of photographs,” and brings the work of a true pioneer of photography to a contemporary audience.

A Village Lost and Found, published by Frances Lincoln, is set to hit bookshelves on October 22nd. To place pre-orders or read some reviews, check out the publisher’s website here.

Chattanooga, Tennessee. Copyright © Robert Frank

In post-war American photography, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more influential book than Robert Frank’s 1958 masterpiece, The Americans. In it, Frank, an emigrant from Switzerland, details his cross-country trip through the United States with 83 stirring portraits of every corner of American society. His style and subject matter shocked and appalled critics, but with the help of friends like Jack Kerouac, William de Kooning and Allen Ginsberg, his work became an inspiration for generations of photographers to follow.

On his trip through the U.S., Frank effectively captured the contradictions existing between the glamors and realities of American life, between wealth, race and economic class. His focus on these tensions was highlighted by a unique style. His subjects were always off-center, or the lighting was poor, giving his work a dusty, gritty, haphazard feel. This new technique was unprecedented.

Unfortunately, such an abrupt style rubbed contemporary photographers and journalists the wrong way, and Frank’s book was ridiculed almost instantly. One critic even called his photos a “meaningless blur,” full of “drunken horizons and general sloppiness.”

But, in his new book, Photography After Frank, New York Times columnist Philip Gefter argues that Frank’s work was not meaningless. In fact, it was nothing short of groundbreaking.

“Robert Frank basically liberated the picture frame,” said Gefter in an interview with NPR. “[Frank was] aiming for a sort of poetic immediacy of experience in the work itself. like [Jack] Kerouac, he liberates the photo frame from the traditional compositional symmetry. That characterizes the divide of what I see as the photography before Robert Frank.” Indeed, Kerouac may have been the one who helped Frank on his feet. The two met on the sidewalk outside a party, and after seeing his photos, Kerouac agreed to pen an introduction.

Since then, The Americans has become one of the great cultural touchstones in American art. In describing his own work, Frank just wanted to show people something meaningful. “When people look at my pictures,” he once said, “I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”

And now you may have a chance to see Frank’s pictures, up close and personal. In commemoration of the book’s 50th anniversary this year, the complete set of original photos will be on tour with displays at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

 We’ve all seen the photo-booths at malls, where couples and teenagers give their best mugshots and walk away with a strip of pictures right on the spot. Well, what if you could take one of those booths home with you? That’s the idea behind Australia-based Photobooth, an innovative company that’s currently marketing an inflatable, portable photography booth.

According to their website, Photobooth is “the world’s first fully portable, high resolution, digital, architecturally designed, part inflatable photo-booth. Developed by two commercial photographers from Melbourne, the concept was stumbled upon when we turned a tiny room into a digital photo-booth for a studio launch party. It was an instant hit, with queues of people and around 800 shots taken by the end of the night.”

Inside the booths are an 11-mega pixel camera that captures your best moments in color or black-and-white, plus an option that lets you choose the quality of your images. All photos will then be stored online, with only subscribers to the site able to view and order prints. Images can be supplied as 72dpi web ready files, 150dpi desktop ready files or 300dpi A3+ print ready files.

Photobooth also offers a unique service for companies renting its services: branding. Each image can be tagged as it’s shot with your company’s logo, slogan or message, so that your brand is highly visible on each photograph. Or, as they put it, “so everyone knows who’s picking up the bill.” After the party’s over and all the photos have been taken, you can then keep track of who’s been viewing your pictures, the number of visits to your gallery as well as details of your subscribers.

Unfortunately Photobooth is only in Australia at the moment. So unless you’re Down Under, or until Photobooth finds a way to cross the pond, it looks like the fax machine will remain the highlight at your company parties.

Since the first time a photographer decided to compliment one of his pictures by adding a border, the art of photo-framing has come a long way. Now, with the release of Hewlett-Packard’s revolutionary DreamScreen, the next generation of photo frames has finally arrived.

Gone are the days when your family snapshots were relegated to dark corners of your home. In fact, with all of its multimedia ad-ons, the DreamScreen 100 ($249) puts your photos right alongside your flashy home entertainment system. It offers a 10.2 inch monitor (or a 13 inch monitor from the 300 model) that can stream photos from your home computer, display photos from a photo sharing account and show updates from all your friends on Facebook. It can even play music, either from Pandora Internet radio or your pick of 10,000 other radio stations.

The device runs with two gigabytes of memory, plus is able to accommodate standard flash memory cards or USB drives in case you want to increase its capacity. This also allows you to do a quick photo show directly from your digital camera. The controls are located on the lower right (the part that used to be called the frame).

Though the number of websites available will be quite limited at first, the DreamScreen marks HP’s efforts to bring back the idea of placing smartscreens throughout households. “What we’re really trying to do is bring a simple, user-intuitive device that’s always on, always connected to the Internet, to bring Web applications that don’t require PCs,” said Ameer Karim, director of worldwide marketing with HP’s futures and innovations group.

As for the device’s impact on photography itself, one can only imagine it will be yet another encouragement for consumers to bring their cameras everywhere with them. After all, when you can display all your favorite photos around the house, and access them with such ease, why not snap as many pictures as you can?

Whoever said the sky’s the limit obviously didn’t go to MIT.

For about the cost of an iPod, two MIT students have sent a camera into near-space and snapped beautiful million-dollar shots of our planet. Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh spent a measly $148 on their contraption, which consisted of a Canon PowerShot A470 point-and-shoot camera, a styrofoam cooler and a weather balloon filled with helium. Their experiment, nicknamed Project Icarus, proves how a little ingenuity and careful planning can overcome even the tightest budgets.

The two students first had to figure out how to find the ingredients for their project through consumer-ready retailers. As they discovered, durable weather balloons (which can float as high as 20 miles up) are available on the internet and can be filled with helium at a party-supplies store for a total of $50. To solve the problem of low temperature in the stratosphere (-55 C), they wrapped the camera in hand-warmers and placed it inside a styrofoam beer cooler.

Then, rather than spend thousands of dollars on a state-of-the-art radio modem tracker, Lee and Yeh purchased a cheap $50 cell phone equipped with GPS technology. They attached it to the camera, and it updated them on its location via text messages.

Before the launch, on September 2nd, they also hacked the camera’s hardware and set up an intervalometer, a device which programmed the camera to snap photos every five seconds. The picture seen above was taken at 93,000 feet (18miles), the likely spot where the balloon popped and sent the contraption plummeting for 40 minutes back to Earth.

The resulting images, ranging from snapshots of cloud-specked land formations on Earth’s surface to hazy blue, sun-glazed pictures of Earth’s curvature, bridge the gap between science and art.

“This could be something big,” said Lee. “Imagine if the art kids and the science kids in high school got together to do something like [a space launch]. The fact that we were able to accomplish space photography on such a low budget and with minimal electronic modifications proves that it’s really possible for anyone, anyone at all, to do.”

So if you always thought it took a lot of money to capture great shots and be an innovative photographer, take Lee’s advice and just find an easier way. The world is out there — and anyone can discover it.

“Viaje a Giraradot, Colombia,” from Nereo: Images From Half a Century

The art of photography is about more than just capturing an image. It’s about telling a story. That’s the idea behind the new collection from world-renowned Colombian photographer Nereo Lopez Maria, who, in his 89 years, has told many stories.

“As photographers we are witnesses to the time in which we live; that’s why we have to tell the stories like they are,” said Nereo, who currently lives in Queens, New York. “I’m a photographer to recount life.”

Nereo: Images From Half a Century (available through Amazon for $40) features 63 black-and-white photos, each of which displays Nereo’s uncanny ability at capturing human emotion. The book covers only the first half of a storied career that has spanned six decades, yet it includes moving portraits from a budding master. Inside are photos from bull-fights, including one where hundreds of people are running away with mixed expressions of joy and terror, as well as sincere and moving portraits of young children, nursing mothers and the field-hardened faces of farm workers.

The collection also includes exclusive photographs of author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whom Meza met in the early ’60s when he worked as a photo-journalist. The two would become life-long friends, and Meza would accompany Marquez on a trip to Sweden where the latter artist was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Images is the first book available in the United States to showcase the work of Nereo. And if it garners him any of the attention he receives in his home of Colombia, it definitely won’t be his last.

Here’s an example of the right shot, one of Marc’s school portaits.

School has started anew, and pretty soon kids everywhere are going to be sitting in front of a camera and immortalizing their faces for their school portraits in the yearbook. This is understandably a tense moment. After all, this photograph will be seen by everyone else and will be how all their crushes remember them in the years to come. So to prepare your young subject for everything from kindergarten pictures to senior portraits, follow these quick tips to ensure everything turns out flawless.

Rest

- A well-rested, fresh-faced subject will always take a better picture than someone with bags under their eyes. Plenty of sleep will also make them more comfortable and relaxed in front of a camera.

Hair Cut

-A recent trimming usually leaves hard lines, so tell them not to get a hair cut right before the shoot. This will also leave ample time to grow a more natural look.

Makeup

- It’s called Cake-face and it has ruined more photos than you can imagine. If you can’t tell when to say when, test it out on a close friend or loved-one. If they can’t tell who you are anymore, you’ve got too much make-up on.

Clothing

- Everyone remembers the goofy kid who wore the tight leather shirt and a clock around his neck. Don’t let them be that kid.

Background

- Some school photographers will let you choose a background color. If possible, pick something that contrasts with their outfit or matches their eyes.

Hat Hair

- Boys like to wear caps, but many are unaware of the mess that’s left when they take them off. Make sure to keep the hats at home before unveiling your child to the world.

Practice

- Before the shoot,  have your kids practice sitting, posing and smiling in front of the mirror. This way they know what expression looks best and what to ask of you, the photographer. If your child is having his or her portrait taken, practicing a smile beforehand will make it look more fluid and natural sitting for a picture.

Images from 50 Photographs by Jessica Lange - Courtesy of Lange/Powerhouse Books

Jessica Lange knows a little something about being captured. The Academy Award-winning actress rose to fame in 1976’s King Kong when she played a damsel abducted by a giant ape. Since then she’s been captured on film in such notable movies as Frances, Tootsie and the recent Emmy-nominated HBO film, Grey Gardens.

But in Jessica Lange’s latest role, it will be her turn to do the capturing. In her new book,”50 Photographs by Jessica Lange,” the actress chronicles over 15 years of photos taken during her travels in North America, Africa and Europe. She is currently showcasing a select few from her work, including a special presentation in New Orleans on October 3rd.

Lange actually developed a love of photography when she enrolled in an intro class at the University of Minnesota in 1969. But, as apparently was common in the summer of love, she dropped out to wander the world and never gave the art of light-writing a second thought.

Until 15 years ago.  One evening her longtime partner, actor Sam Shepherd, came home from a movie set with a Leica, and Lange was immediately hooked. At first she just took pictures of the kids, but soon it became an artistic passion. “I’d go down into the basement after the kids were in bed,” she said, “put on some Al Green and Sam Cooke, and develop pictures.”

Now Lange is showing her work at exhibits. For her, as with many other artists of multiple mediums,  she is drawn to the simplicity of black-and-white images. “I can describe acting in much more concrete terms than I can photography,” she says. “But there’s something about presenting an image in black-and-white that’s so reductive in a way. It sort of eliminates all extraneous information.”

A preview of Lange’s book, “50 Photographs,” can be seen at the website for New Orlean’s A Gallery for Fine Photography.

Click To View 

David Smith is an award winning photographer from South Africa, who I met last year in “the bush.” David gives practical and useful tips for how to come away with natural and “inspired” photos from a safari, or just a hike in the woods with wildlife. Join us as I discuss with David how to approach animals in the wild, equipment tips and how to be prepared for action.  This interview will add a new dimension to your photography. BTW click to check out some of my shots from Aferica last year.  

 Mono Lake, in the High Sierra

We just returned from hiking a section of the 211 mile John Muir Trail. On our way to the trailhead, we stopped by Mono Lake, which Mark Twian called a “lifeless, treeless, hideous desert… the loneliest place on earth.” This was also the place where Clint Eastwood filmed the “High Plains Drifter.” In any case it is an pretty haunting place. one which draws many photographers to try to capture its stark yet mystical qualities.

Stay tuned SilberStudios.Tv where I’ll bring you a video of our hike with photo tips along the way. He’s some of the shots on our journey: