Nikon discovers burgeoning talent : Gina Brocker of University of Wales, Newport, was named as the Grand Prize Winner at Nikon’s prestigious photographic Discovery Awards, held at Olympia, London. With her outstanding portfolio submission, Gina Brocker competed against 24 other students from around the UK and Ireland and won the coveted £5000 plus a D300 camera kit awarded by Nikon UK, as part of an initiative the company set up to seek out and support emerging photographic talent around the UK. In addition, twenty four students from each of the participating universities and colleges also picked up a D300 camera kit in recognition of their work.

Nikon Discovery Awards
At the judges’ discretion Laura Pannack of University of Brighton and Elliot Wilcox of the University of Wales, Newport also received a £300 Judges Award for their efforts. A full list of the winners can be found below. The Nikon Discovery Awards, in association with British Journal of Photography, was set up two years ago to encourage photographic excellence by offering students and their universities or colleges the chance to win a share of £50,000 worth of prizes. After a successful first year and an outstanding array of entries, the competition made a strong comeback this year to support and celebrate the work of students across the UK and Ireland by providing them with a platform to showcase their work on a national scale.

Impressive array of photographic names
The competition entries were judged by an impressive array of photographic names, including Simon Bainbridge, Editor of the British Journal of Photography, and Dylan Martinez, chief photographer at Reuters News Pictures. Presenting the awards on the night was renowned photographer Alex Bailey, who is known for shooting big budget film photography including titles such as Atonement, The Other Boleyn Girl and Bridget Jones’s Diary.

Support for the student photographer market
Chris Hoare, Professional Business Manager at Nikon UK says: “Nikon has always been keen to support the student photographer market, which is echoed in our work with the Academy Colleges on projects such as the Discovery Awards. Initiatives such as this help to develop up and coming talent break through into the commercial world of professional photography, and benefits the industry as a whole. ”

University Winners
Blackpool and Fylde College – Emil Charlaff
Dewsbury College of Further and Higher Education – Xanthe Hutchinson
Defence School Of Photography – Alex Knott
Edinburgh College of Art – Abigaile Fraser
Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art Design & Technology – Jacki Hehir
Kingston University – Daniel Jon
University of the Arts London – Scott Webster
Napier University – Graeme Yule
North East Surrey College of Technology – Patrick Kilian
Newcastle College – Mark Slater
Nottingham Trent University – Amanda Absolom
Thames Valley University – Mayte Torres Vazquez
University College Falmouth – Adam Boon
University for The Creative Arts at Rochester – Saana Elina Kytomaki
University of Brighton – Laura Pannack
University of Gloucestershire – Stacey Hatfield
The Arts Institute Bournemouth – Ivetta Vaivode
Grimsby Institute of Higher and Further Education – Richard Corkwell
Manchester Metropolitan University – Joshua Rothery
Norton College – Gary Taylor
Plymouth College of Art and Design – Khali Ackford
South East Essex College -Elizabeth Drew
London College of Communication – Toby Smith
University of Wales, Newport – Gina Brocker
University of Westminster – Peter Watkins

Gina Brocker’s winning portfolio
Simon Bainbridge, Editor of BJP says: “We were really taken aback by the standard and diversity of the entries this year, which ranged from cutting-edge fashion imagery to tightly conceptualised portraiture. In the end, Gina’s photo essay stood out. It’s documentary storytelling at its best, on par with many of the great names to have emerged from the Newport photography course over the years.”

Source: www.letsgodigital.org

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My look at the i1 product line has taken course over several articles that began with the i1 Basic.  In this installment I am going to look at the i1 Beamer Module Upgrade Module. The use of this module works much in the same way that the basic works to profile your monitor. This time though you have to work with a projector and so the spectrophotometer has to be aimed at a distant screen to measure the colors. The goal of this module is to build a custom profile that you can use on your computer for use with your projector.

There are two fundamental paths that you can take with the i1 line: i1 Basic and the i1 XTreme. The i1 Basic is marketed as an affordable, upgradeable, professional spectral color measurement solution and monitor profiler that will allow you to add on additional features as you need them. Once you own the i1 Basic, you own the capabilities of the other modules, you only need to purchase an access code to activate them. Here I will look at the ease of use of the i1 Beamer Module Upgrade Module. This will enable the i1Match software to calibrate and profile your projection display (beamers), and will allow you to accurately match the colors that your projector displays on the screen with what was captured from your camera or scanner, as well as accurately represent what is displayed on you monitor. This module comes standard comes as a part of the i1 XTreme.

What does it take to run the i1 Basic? Either a Windows 2000, XP, or Vista with a 300 MHz PC or better, or Mac OS X (10.3 or higher) Power G3 or higher processor, a powered USB port, 128 MB RAM, and 100 MB of hard-drive space.

Once you have your module installed, you need to make sure that you have your monitor calibrated as in part one of this series. With your monitor calibrated, you fire up the Eye-One Match software. When it starts up you will choose the projector module. Please note that although there may be other modules visible, they will not be active unless have purchased the add-on functionality, or have purchased the i1 XTreme. Also note, on the right of the screen there is context sensitive help that can guide you if you are having some problems. If you have the i1 Basic and purchased the Beamer module and your projector module is not active, make sure that your access code was properly installed.

With everything installed, the first thing that you need to do is to determine if you want to use the easy or advanced mode. The only difference is that the advanced mode will require you to select your white point. If you choose advanced then you will select the desired white point. The white points range from a warm (5000) to a cool (7500) Kelvin. Typically, 5000 (or D50) is the recommended viewing condition for proofing. You then place the calibration module in the beamer assembly and perform a calibration.

Source: feedproxy.google.com

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Labs beta: As part of our ten years celebration we’ve been working hard to bring you a beta of our next big site feature; Challenges. Anyone who has been on the dpreview forums will be more than aware of the popularity of photographic challenges. Until now these have been created primarily by a single challenge host creating a new thread in the forums to promote their challenge idea and others following up with entries. We decided to take this concept and develop a fully integrated challenge system for dpreview which will allow series of challenges to run, with a flexible range of rule sets, voting options and winner concepts. The public beta of our Challenges system will begin this coming Monday 29th December with the opening of five initial challenges created by ourselves which any registered dpreview member can enter. After this we’ll be looking for challenge hosts to continue the next phase of the beta.

We’ll provide more information on Challenges and rules around the public beta on Monday.

Those observant among you will also have noticed our fancy labs logo, this is a new section to the site which is a placeholder for all of the projects currently in beta (available / soon to be available for testing) as well as recently completed development projects.

Source: www.dpreview.com

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When I first saw the Photobook Creator, I thought that this might be nice for people who were into scrapbooking, but it wasn't until I started playing with it that I saw its real potential. What is the Photobook Creator? It is a thermal binding machine that you can use to make hard-bound photo books. It is made by the Unibind company who have been making heavy duty thermal binding equipment for years.

What you get with the Photobook Creator is a resin binding machine, a resin-based binders, and software. Actually you get a registration card that you can use to download the software. After that, you provide the photographs and the paper. The Photobook Creator uses the same technology that is used in Unibind's other thermal binding products. In the fold of the photobook is a steel spine that contains a strip of resin. When the book is placed in the binding machine, the resin is heated and this is what glues the paper to the binder.

The Photobook Creator comes with the Photobook Creator mechanism which what binds the books, one black 3mm Photobook, and instructions on how to download the software that can aid in laying out your images. You can purchase additional Photobooks through various places like Amazon. They come in sizes from 5×7 to 12 x12 in size, and if you buy in bulk, you can get 10 for around $80 USD.

While you can use literally any kind of paper, if you want to make this look good, you really want to use a quality paper. That said, now all you have to do is create the pages. Ideally this will be a double-sided photo paper that is compatible with your printer.

Of course, the simplest type of book would be a general photobook. The software is pretty straightforward to use and there is nothing here that requires you to use the provided software. If you have another product like Adobe Photoshop that you are more comfortable with, then by all means use it. In this case, you just print out your pages how you would like them presented on what ever paper you want to use.

Once that is done, then you plug in the Unibind system. Keep in mind this system has no on and off switch so plugging it in makes it ready to use. Next you place the pages into the binder cover. You want to make sure that everything is lined up correctly.

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“Our traditional trip to the Christmas Tree Farm to find our tree also included multiple trips aboard the Farm’s Christmas Village Train”. Ontario, Canada. Taken by Sherri

Source: planetearthdailyphoto.blogspot.com

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