Instagram is holding onto its place as the darling of the mobile photo sharing world. After adding a whopping two million new users in a month thanks to Thanksgiving and the release of the iPhone 4S, the app now has a shiny new trophy for its shelf: it has been selected as Apple’s “iPhone App of the Year“. The future is looking extremely bright for the 13-month-old, 7-man company: Goldman Sachs recently designated it as a potential IPO candidate and founder Kevin Systrom expects the membership base to double once the Android version arrives.

(via TechCrunch)

12-year-old Sam Kaye of Radlett, Hertfordshire has become the youngest person ever to earn a distinguished membership to the Royal Photographic Society, the world’s oldest photographic society. Kaye became a Licentiate of the RPS by submitting ten of his photographs anonymously to a panel of judges, who were shocked to learn of his age after awarding him with the distinction.

Many of the photographs in his portfolio were captured during a family vacation to South Africa. Here’s a few of the images that won him the distinction:

Back in 2010, Kaye also won the Royal Horticultural Society’s “Young Photographer of the Year” award. He first ventured into photography at the age of six, and hopes to become a professional photographer once he’s all grown up.

(via Daily Mail via NPhoto)

Image credits: Photographs by Sam Kaye

A man in Atlanta was just awarded $40,000 in damages after having his cell phone confiscated and photos deleted while filming police activity from a public location. The man was filming for Copwatch, an organization that aims to crack down on law enforcement wrongdoing by filming their activities, and was told by the police that he had no right to record them. An interesting quote from the CNN segment above is the lesson this case should send to other police departments,

The lesson is that police departments need to know that citizens can film their activity if it is taking place in a public place.

Not a bad result for having some cell phone photos deleted, huh?

TIME magazine has named the Sony Alpha A55 as one of the top 50 inventions of 2010. They write,

A.K.A. the camera that never blinks. Traditional digital SLR cameras take the nicest photographs around, but they’re hobbled by a decades-old technical limitation: when you snap a picture, the mirror that’s been redirecting the image to your eye and to a focusing sensor pops up momentarily as the image is captured. Until it goes back down, the camera can’t focus. Sony’s Alpha A55 ($849.99 with lens) fixes that with an ingenious translucent mirror that stays put. That means you can shoot up to 10 perfectly focused photos a second and record HD video that never goes blurry. Bonus advantage: with no need to allocate interior space for a moving mirror, the Alpha is noticeably smaller and lighter than its Sony SLR brethren.

10 perfectly focused photos per second? That’s a pretty interesting claim.

Check out the full list of 50 inventions here.

A couple days ago we covered the winning image of the British Journal of Photography’s international photo contest and how many readers disagreed with the photo’s merits. The prize for that contest was a one week exhibition and a Sigma digital compact camera. Now compare that to the above photograph, which won AU $80,000 in the 2010 Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize, one of the richest prizes in the world. Like the BJP photo, this photograph became the subject of debate.

Photojournalist Joseph Feil writes on his blog,

Unfortunately, there also seems to be fairly unanimous opinion that the winning image is far from the most worthy winner (see the other finalists here) and unfortunately some murmurings about the winner and the judge knowing each other pretty well. Dean [Sewell, the winner] was also the winner of this prize in 2009 when it was judged by Andrew Quilty, a member of the well known and tight photographic collective Oculi which Dean is also a member of. Whilst I have no doubt that both judges performed their tasks without favour, it is important for independence to be seen to be present and the structure of the judging of the Moran seems to leave this open to criticism.

What do you think of this winning image compared to the BJP one?

Is this photo worth $80,000 (via The Online Photographer)

Image credits: Photograph by Dean Sewell

The TED conference announced yesterday that the 2011 TED Prize would be awarded to the anonymous street artist and photographer known as JR. Previous winners of the $100,000 award include Bill Clinton, James Nachtwey and Bono.

In the announcement, TED writes,

JR creates pervasive art that spreads uninvited on buildings of Parisian slums, on walls in the Middle East, on broken bridges in Africa or in favelas in Brazil. People in the exhibit communities, those who often live with the bare minimum, discover something absolutely unnecessary but utterly wonderful. And they don’t just see it, they make it. Elderly women become models for a day; kids turn into artists for a week. In this art scene, there is no stage to separate the actors from the spectators.

The 27-year-old prints massive portraits on waterproof vinyl, and displays them prominently in slums, drawing attention to the neglected residents of those downtrodden areas. He also reinvests most of the money he makes from his art into future projects — one of his pieces went for more than $35,000 in 2009 — and plans to do the same with his TED Prize winnings. Artist Shepard Fairey calls JR “the most ambitious street artist working“, while French journalist Fabrice Bousteau wrote that JR is “the one we already call the Cartier-Bresson of the 21st century”.

To see photos of some of JR’s creations, check out his website.

Award to Artist Who Gives Slums a Human Face (via dvafoto)

Adorama announced today that “So Long & Farewell” by Neville Black was picked as the grand prize winner of the first annual iPhone Photo Contest, which comes with a $1,000 gift certificate as the prize.

Black tells us,

I’m a photographer based in Ottawa Ontario Canada (moved from Vancouver BC recently) and I’m still in awe at some of the architecture in the capital. I’ve shot most of it all before with my SLR but when I picked up the iPhone 3Gs to add to my camera collection, it was like rediscovering photography. The iPhone is in a world of its own, its amazing. I created this photo with TiltShift, DXP (blurry shampoo bottles made the sky) and my favorite app I pretty much use for all my shots, Lo-Mob.

The photograph was selected from more than 17,000 submissions by the team of seven judges.

To see the other photographs picked by the judges, check out the list of prize winners. Congrats Neville!

Image credit: Photograph by Neville Black and used with permission

Candidate photographs are nominated through the website, and must be cameraphone photos shot in 2009 and distributed on Twitter through one of the popular social media channels (i.e. Twitpic, Flickr, etc…). The nomination phase ends on February 5th, 2010.

An obvious favorite to win is the following photograph by Janis Krums of US Airways Flight 1549‘s successful ditch in the Hudson River on January 15, 2009:

Krums was on the ferry sent to pick up the passengers, and sent the tweeted the photo via Twitpic from his cameraphone. Here’s a screenshot:

What made the tweet and story particularly noteworthy was that the real-time nature of Twitter allowed the photograph to circulate widely before any mainstream news sources were able to obtain photographs. We’re guessing this is exactly the type of photo the new Shorty award would like to honor.

The ubiquity of cameraphones combined with real-time distribution offered by Twitter has changed the world of photography. When something happens in one part of the world, people can now see it all over the world almost instantly — if someone with a cameraphone and Twitter account is nearby.

Can you think of any other candidate photograph for the new award?

Nikon just announced the winners of the Nikon Festival short film (140 seconds or less) contest a few hours ago, with the grand prize winner going to Marko Slavnic for his Chicken VS Penguin film embedded above. The win comes with a cool $100,000 and a Nikon D5000 DSLR kit. Slavnic’s description:

We all have our share of bad jobs as teenagers. This was mine.

The audience award winner ($25,000) was New York State of Mind by Josh Friedberg.

24 hours in New York City, shot over two different days last year. Working with the Driendl Group I’m lucky enough to gain access to some amazing locations. Starting with sunrise over the East River, moving on to shoot Jerry Driendl at the old Yankee Stadium, back to the lab for a bit, then out to a packed Times Square. Just when I thought the day was done, huge snowflakes started falling from the sky, so it was time to break out the kit again and try to capture the fleeting interaction of nature and the city that never sleeps. A beautiful end to another day in the city. I love the energy of NYC.

About a month ago we reported that José Luis Rodriguez had come under fire after winning the prestigious Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year award. The winning photograph depicted a rare, Iberian wolf hopping a fence to reach food placed outside by the photographer, but rival photographers soon began to question whether the wolf was indeed a wild wolf.

After a month of investigation, Rodriguez has been stripped of the prestigious award and banned for life, in what some are now calling “the biggest scandal to ever hit the world of wildlife photography”. The winning image was selected from among 43,135 submitted from 94 countries.

A statement on the competition’s website states,

The judging panel looked at a range of evidence and took specialist advice from panel judges who have extensive experience of photographing wildlife including wolves. They also considered the responses to specific questions put to the photographer José Luis Rodriguez.

However, Rodriguez continues to deny that the wolf was a captive wolf.

(via Amateur Photographer)