VICE magazine has launched a competition to find find five creative talents for The Creating Sense5 party. The winning talent will be selected by award winning band Hot Chip. Enter the competition and you could be personally chosen by Hot Chip and other judges, to show off your talent at an exclusive event on the 4th of June. The competition hopes to uncover creative talent that can cleverly stimulate the 5 senses with flair, imagination and individuality. One of the senses is of course sight, so photographers are welcome!

Website: Creating Sense5

Nikon UK has announced that the ‘Sports Photographer of the Year’ and the ‘Photographer of the Year’ awards both went to photographers using the Nikon D3. Dickie Pelham of The Sun won the former, while the latter was awarded to Stephan Rousseau of PA Photos for his photographs that “sum up the British political year brilliantly”. Dickie Pelham won the ‘Sports Photographer of the Year’ for the fourth consecutive year, but it was only one year ago that he switched back to Nikon.

USA Today and DiscoverAmerica.com have announced a photography competition, starting today. Amateur and professional photographers are asked “to serve as unofficial U.S. ambassadors by submitting iconic images of America that will attract foreign visitors to the USA”. The best submissions will be featured at pictureamerica.usatoday.com as well as at DiscoverAmerica.com, and the winner will be treated to four nights of double-occupancy hotel accommodations in Las Vegas, New Orleans or Orlando. Other prizes include a Kodak ESP 7 All-in-One inkjet printer and a $500 American Express gift card. The contest entry period ends at 11:59pm (E.T.) on May 8, 2009.

Website: Picture America Contest Details At USAToday.com

The 3rd F/STOP International Photography Festival will take place in Leipzig, Germany between 1 - 7 July, and you have until 20 April to send in your work(s). The theme of the competition is “Where Do We Go from Here?”. You can submit up to 3 individual photographs or 3 series on a CD, in JPEG format. The entry fee is €20 per submission.

Website: F/STOP International Photography Festival

Festimage International Image Festival, a photography event / competition promoted by the City Council of Chaves, is now accepting entries from all over the world. There are no set topics or themes, and all photographic “genres, styles and concepts” are welcome. Each contestant may submit one work only, in digital form. Works must be sent in from 8 April to 14 May. The winners will be announced on 15 June.

Website: Festimage 2009 Rules

The winners of the 152nd Print Exhibition Awards have been named. The Royal Photographic Society’s International Print Exhibition is the longest standing exhibition of its kind in the world, having been staged almost every year since the founding of The Society in 1853. This year’s theme was ‘New Horizons’, and almost 2,000 prints were submitted from over 500 photographers worldwide. The Gold Award winner is Michael Birt for his print titled ‘Lindsay Duncan’. The Silver Awards have been given to Bill Jackson and Toby Pier. The Bronze Awards go to Max Catterall, Amanda Bollini and David Maitland. Yoshikazu Hayashi from Japan has won the Allen & Overy Award, for his print titled ‘Construction Site’. The relatively new Under 25 Award went to 23-year-old Sean Lamoureux from the USA, for his work ‘MO1:Persistent Jury’.

Photo: David Maitland, “Who Eats Who?”

The Royal Photographic Society is organising a series of events centred around the theme of staged photography and manipulation. Entitled “The Real Thing? - Staging, Manipulation and Photographic Truth”, the series endeavours “to explore the enduring relevance of staged photography and the consequences of its myths, metaphors, facts and fictions”. To accompany The Real Thing, a competition in which participants are asked to create a modern version of O G Rejlander’s Two Ways of Life by digitally combining and altering images, has also been announced. (The original was printed from 32 separate negatives, combined in the darkroom to make one extraordinary image.) You have until 30 April to enter a print in this competition.

Website: Royal Photographic Society Visual Literacy Conference & Events 2009

Travel guide publishers DK Eyewitness have just announced a photo contest. Open to amateurs, professionals and Under 16s alike, the DK Eyewitness Travel PhotoBritain Competition
invites UK residents to explore the different faces of Britain. The contest spans four categories; Iconic, Heritage, Wild and My Britain, with the winner awarded the prize of having their image published on the front cover of DK Eyewitness Great Britain 2010. Entries are accepted 30 March through 31 May. A selection of outstanding entries will be exhibited at Waterstone’s flagship store in Piccadilly, London, throughout July/August 2009. Read on for the details.

Tomorrow is the closing date of Panasonic’s online photo contest. Established in 2003, the Lumix Award is awarded each year to celebrate excellence in digital photography. This year’s theme is The Living Planet. The monthly prize for March is a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ28 digital camera, while the overall winner of the Lumix Award competition will receive a Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1 plus a 5-day trip for two to Cornwall, England, including two 3-day passes to the Eden Project.

Website: Panasonic Lumix Award

The jurors of the Photography.Book.Now 2009 competition have been announced. We wrote about this $25,000 competition at the beginning of this month, when it opened, saying, “the contest celebrates self-published photography books and the photographers behind them”. The lead judge, Darius Himes, was already known back then, but the organisers now named the other jurors as well. Read on to find out who they are.

British photographer Paul Graham has won the £30,000 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. This award, originally set up 13 years ago by The Photographers’ Gallery in London, has been sponsored by the Deutsche Börse Group since 2005, and is claimed to be “the most prestigious photography prize in Europe today”. Graham, 53, was selected by the jury for his publication, A Shimmer of Possibility, which assembles images from everyday life in today’s America. Read on to learn about the other photographers shortlisted for this year’s award.

Photograph by Paul Graham, published here courtesy of The Photographer’s Gallery.

ADP has announced the winners of its student photography competition ‘Bricks and Mortals’. The competition focused on the relationship between people and buildings and was open to entries from higher education students in their final year of photography and similar courses, as well as Part II and Part III architectural students. The first prize goes to Simon Johnson, from the University of Edinburgh, for his photograph, ‘Figure’. Neil Boyd of Strathclyde University finished second with his entry, ‘Disrupted Space’. The third prize was awarded to Nicholas Humes of Queens University Belfast, for his photo, ‘Architecture Under the Obvious’.

The National Press Photographers Association of the USA has announced the winners of ‘The Best of Photojournalism 2009’ award in eight categories. With no less than 53,000 entries submitted by 3,700 press photographers from 147 countries, picking the best must have been tough - and it’s not over yet. So far, the winners of the Sports Action, Sports Feature, The Art of Entertainment, Conceptual Photographic Illustration, Olympics Action, Olympics Feature, Natural Environment, and Sports Picture Story categories have been named, but judging will keep the jury busy for the rest of the week, right up until Friday, when the ‘Photojournalist of the Year’ and the ‘New America Award’ winners will be announced.

Bulldog have just launched a new UK competition to find the best photograph of their male grooming products. These can be photographs of the products against a beautiful background, lifestyle shots or even pictures of your products on holiday with you! The final result is in your hands and will be based on the number of votes the picture receives. The winner will receive £100 worth of Bulldog products and the runner-up will receive £50 worth. The closing date for the competition is noon on 30th April 2009. Each entrant must submit one photograph in jpeg format with an explanation detailing when, where and why the photograph was taken in no more than 50 words.

Website: Bulldog Photography Competition

The 44 winners of the 2009 Sony World Photography Awards have been announced. Each of the photographers on the list will be exhibited and honoured at the Sony World Photography Awards ceremony at the prestigious Palais des Festivals in Cannes, France, on Thursday 16 April. Of the 12 professional category winners, one photographer will be the recipient of the L’Iris D’Or, the Sony World Photography Awards Photographer of the Year. On the night they will be awarded $25,000 along with Sony camera equipment. The winning amateur photographer, selected from the eight category finalists, will receive a $5,000 cash prize and Sony camera equipment.

You could win $20,000 in Microsoft’s Future Pro Photographers student photo contest. Returning for its second year, the Microsoft Future Pro Photographers Photography Contest provides a unique opportunity for college and university student photographers from around the world to showcase their artistic talent and photographic style. A Grand Prize of US$20,000 cash and a digital workflow prize package is on offer, plus three First Place winners in the following categories: Nature & Landscape; People & Portraits; and Sports & Photojournalism who will each win US$3000 cash and a digital workflow prize package. The submission period is from March 1st until April 30th, 2009.

Website: Microsoft Future Pro Photographer 2009

David Brunetti is the overall winner of the 2008 Fujifilm Distinctions Awards. David’s winning image, ‘Mother’, is part of a series of portraits of the Rroma community in Romania. Like the other 3,000 submissions to Distinctions 2008, David’s image was taken on Fujifilm professional film. Entries to the 2009 Distinctions Awards can be submitted from 1 April 2009.

Gary Walsh has scooped the top prize in the 2008 Fujifilm Envisage Photography Awards, and also claimed the two runner-up awards in the finals. The Award means Gary wins £1000 for the client who commissioned the winning image. The Fujifilm Envisage Photography Awards are designed to help members of Fujifilm’s Envisage marketing programme to generate more sales leads and therefore more profits for their studio.

The Name Your Dream Assignment contest has just been officially launched. The contest is now open for submissions and voting for a month, until midnight on April 3th. The winner will be announced on or around April 17th. The Name Your Dream Assignment is a chance for photographers to go anywhere in the world on assignment. The winner will get a $50,000 cash award plus lots of goodies including a Lenovo ThinkPad W700 notebook computer with Windows Vista, specially designed for photographers.

Website: Name Your Dream Assignment

The second annual Photography.Book.Now competition is now open for entries. The contest celebrates self-published photography books and the photographers behind them, with a grand prize of $25,000 on offer. Entries will be accepted in three categories – Fine Art, Editorial, and Commercial. “Photography.Book.Now offers photographers of all backgrounds a wonderful opportunity to showcase compelling work in book form. The three categories celebrate the photography book as an experience that is more than just the sum of its parts.” commented Darius Himes, lead judge. The closing date is 16:00pm BST on the 16th July, 2009.