Your photo could feature on the cover of Lonely Planet’s ‘Encounter’ guides, the main prize in a new competition. Run by Lonely Planet, the world-leading travel guide publisher, and Pikeo.com, a new photo-sharing website, you could also win a free trip to India, Russia, Morocco or Kenya courtesy of Intrepid Travel. You need to tsubmit unique and inspiring pictures of London, Paris, Barcelona and Istanbul to enter. The competition is open to those in the UK, France, Spain, USA and Canada and entries close on September 8, 2008.

The Box That Changed Our Lives is a new photography contest aiming to raise awareness of the impact that container shipping has on our lives. Last year alone, the equivalent of about 141 million twenty-foot containers moved around the oceans loaded with goods. Aimed at amateur or ‘have-a-go’ photographers, the competition will run throughout August and September 2008. The overall best entry will be picked by a panel of judges, including US based professional photographer Nick Souza, and awarded the winning prize of a top-of-the-range Nikon SLR digital camera. Closing date for entries is Friday 12th September 2008.

The winner of the 2008 Fujifilm Student Awards is David Wala from Newcastle College. This year’s Awards were run in conjunction with Penguin Books and the brief was to provide a cover for the re-issued version of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 masterpiece, Invisible Man. David’s winning image will now grace the cover when the book is released as part of Penguin’s Modern Classics series, and he also wins £200 of Fujifilm Professional film, a library of 100 Penguin Classics titles and a copy of the book, ‘Seven Hundred Penguins’. The 2009 Fujifilm Student Awards will be launched in September.

The Expose Your World photography competition is offering $70,000 worth of prizes. Finalists in all categories will also be part of an end of year winners’ exhibition with photos and video presented by Pixel Perfect Prolab. A selection of the winners’ images and stories will feature in the Australian Traveller magazine, be displayed in the RovingEye coffeetable book by Asukabook and have the opportunity to be represented by RovingEye. Entry is open internationally to all levels of photographers, writers and filmmakers in most categories, while nominations for the Young Australian Photographer of the Year and nominations for the Australian Adventurer of the Year are required to be Australian citizens. The closing date for entry is August 29 2008.

The Nikon Photo Contest International 2008-2009 will be open for entries from 1 September to 30 November 2008. The theme for this year’s competition is At the Heart of the Image, with two categories, ‘Free Subject’ and ‘My Planet’. Last year’s contest attracted over 16,000 entrants from 135 different countries. There will be an extra prize awarded to an outstanding entry, in addition to the 54 regular prizes and the Grand Winner.

Photographers are now invited to submit their work for the 2009 International Garden Photographer of the Year competition. Prizes include £20,000 cash and equipment as well as international exposure in an exhibition at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The International Garden Photographer of the Year competition is open to everyone and entries are welcome from across the world. For a nominal fee, participants can enter up to four single images in any one category or a themed portfolio of six images into the Portfolio category.

The winners of Mencap’s sixth annual Snap! photography awards have been announced at Proud Gallery in London. The Snap! competition showcases the talents of people with a learning disability through photographs. Alex Proud, founder of Proud Galleries, commented: “The quality and depth of work is stunning and trying to pick the winners was near impossible. In my whole life of working in photography, I don’t think any set of photos has ever made me laugh, cry, gasp or admire quite so much.”

Olympus are offering both a lucky customer and salesperson the chance to win a VIP trip for two to a European Grand Prix during the 2009 season. Just ask a salesperson in the UK to demonstrate any of the E-System cameras in-store, and you could be in with a chance to win this fantastic prize as part of the Olympus Test Drive promotion. The package will include overnight accommodation, a close-up view of the team in action and the best view of the race from the Vodafone McLaren Mercedes VIP Club suite. The Olympus Test Drive promotion will run throughout the summer with the cut off date for entries being 12th September 2008.

The winners of the 5th Annual Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest have been announced. In the July issue of Smithsonian magazine and on the Web at Smithsonian.com, six photographs in five categories were chosen by Smithsonian editors, with one Readers’ Choice selected by Smithsonian.com visitors. Abhijit Dey from Barrackpore, India, received the Grand Prize (a Smithsonian Journeys trip for two) for the photograph, A tribal birth in India. Smithsonian received nearly 7,000 entries in six categories.

Picstop are giving away a Canon EOS 450D, a new 12 megapixel compact DSLR camera, complete with Canon EF-s 18-55mm lens. You just have to answer the question “The Canon 450D can use the SanDisk Extreme III SDHC memory cards, what is the write speed of this card?” The competition closes on 31st August 2008.

Website: Picstop - Canon EOS 450D Giveaway

Iconic Britain is a photographic competition that aims to find 100 images that define Britain. Powered by Microsoft Live Search, a new image sourcing network, you can win prizes both by submitting a photo and voting on other people’s entries, with Nikon Coolpix and D60 DSLR cameras on offer. The Iconic Britain competition is open to residents of the United Kingdom, and it runs from 19th June to 14th August 2008. A panel of experts will choose the category winners and their favourite British icon. You can enter and vote in the contest at http://www.iconicbritain.com

The four winners of Canon’s The Assignment photo contest have just been announced. The final four winners are the UK’s Ivan Hoo (Portrait), David Bernard of the Czech Republic, (Sport) France’s Alan Laboile (Macro) and Dave Derbis from Germany (Landscape). A total of 43,404 images were submitted, and voted for by 192,127 registrants on the competition website. The winners will now have the chance to plan and follow their own personal ‘dream assignment’ – each of which will be filmed for broadcast across Europe later in the year.

Sydney Opera House and HP are running a global photography competition called House in Focus. The lucky winner will have their best shot exhibited at Sydney Opera House, where thousands of visitors will see it every week, and also win a HP TouchSmart PC. Two runners up will each receive a large scale canvas of their image, a roof tile from Sydney Opera House (collected during the original construction) and a book, Building a masterpiece: the Sydney Opera House. You just need to upload your image of Sydney Opera House to enter the contest. Voting of the images is open to the public who can vote until midnight on July 30, when three winners will be selected by the judging panel.

The Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2008 has been won by Slovak photographer Lucia Nimcova for her photo project “Unofficial“. Taking her home town as an example, Nimcova documented how time seems to have stood still since the fall of the Communist regime. The central theme of the Leica Oskar Barnack Award, which has been held every year since 1979 in memory of the inventor of the Leica, Oskar Barnack (1879 – 1936), is the relationship between man and his environment. The closing date for entries to the 2009 contest is January 31st, 2009.

Jan Kostal of the Czech Republic is the grand prize winner of the Canon Fan Foto online competition. His image “Muddy Playground, Bangladesh” was chosen by a panel of experts from Canon and Getty Images. Jan Kostal was one of 11 finalists selected by the expert panel, all of whom received a VIP trip to a UEFA EURO 2008 game and a Canon EOS 450D digital SLR camera.

Ilford is sponsoring the fourth edition of the festival Triestèfotografia, an Italian photography exhibition and competition. Beginning in Trieste, Italy, on the 24th of June, Triestèfotografia continues with a series of exhibitions in Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Germany and Austria. Alessandro Paderni, a photographer specialising in interior design, was selected by a panel of judges as the exhibition’s overview winner.

Sony Ericsson’s World View 2008 mobile camera phone competition is one of the biggest in the world. Now in its third year, more than 70,000 entries from around the world were entered in 2007. The People’s Choice prize will be awarded to the person who receives the most votes from the public around the world, with a trip of a lifetime worth £5,000/€6,250 up for grabs. The Experts’ Choice winner, chosen by Sony Ericsson’s panel of elite photography judges, will receive a trip worth £10,000/€12,500.

The RSPCA Young Photographer Awards 2008 is a prestigious UK photographic competition for under 19s. Anybody aged under 19 on 1 September 2008 can enter their photographs of any animal, large or small. The competition is divided into four categories: under 12 years, 12 to 18 years, pet personalities and the Olympus portfolio. The RSPCA competition is offering the winners some superb prizes including the opportunity to join the RSPCA on an exclusive photoshoot and top Olympus cameras. The deadline for entries is Monday 1 September 2008.

There’s only a few weeks left to enter the ‘Take-a-View’ Landscape Photographer of the Year Awards. This year’s competition offers an impressive total prize fund of £20,000, including £10,000 cash for the overall winner. You have until 12th July 2008 to submit your photographs of the British landscape. An exhibition of the winning images will be held over an eight-week period at the National Theatre on London’s South Bank, and a book will also be published.

The Royal Photographic Society has announced the Award winners of The 151st International Print Exhibition. Almost 3,000 prints were submitted from over 700 photographers worldwide, with entries from 39 countries. The £10,000 Gold Award winner is Richard Crompton for his print titled ‘Generations 2’. “Faces fascinate me. Beguiled by their infinite variations and seduced by random similarities, I decided to explore the genetic links to a family’s look.  With careful framing and reconstruction, my image was complete.” commented Crompton. The RPS’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.