muvee has announced version 8 of muvee Reveal, its home movie-making software. muvee Reveal version 8 boasts features including music trimming on multiple music tracks, direct YouTube and Facebook upload options, and personal branding through logo insertion on your movies.  It is also optimised for NVIDIA CUDA Graphics Processor Units (GPUs), enabling up to 8X faster saving times and superior video preview performance, the company says. muvee Reveal version 8 comes complete with 10 styles, including a new Kinetic style. Styles allow the user to enhance the mood of their home movies with special effects and transitions. Additional stylePacks can be purchased at the manufacturer’s website. muvee Reveal version 8 is available for $79.95.

Website: muvee

Engineering students in the Newcastle and Kidsgrove District have been asked to design, produce and market a photography-related product. Once complete, the products will be assessed by Newcastle-under-Lyme College and JP Service Solutions (JPSS) for their engineering and commercial viability. JPSS have extended their support to the students by setting up a dedicated email address that the students can contact the team on should they have any queries during their time on the course.

Panasonic has released firmware updates for the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1 camera and five Micro Four Thirds lenses. Version 1.1 of the GF1 firmware enables the use of the manual focus assist feature by pressing the rear dial when an MF-only third-party lens is attached to the camera via an adapter, improves autofocus performance during video capture, improves high-ISO image quality, auto white balance accuracy, and autoexposure accuracy in a couple of scene modes. The lens firmware updates, which concern the Lumix G VARIO 7-14mm, 14-45mm & 45-200mm, Lumix G VARIO HD 14-140mm and Lumix G 20mm lenses, improve AF performance in movie recording, and enable AF in full HD mode on lenses that had previously not had this feature.

Website: Joint Update Service

Online digital accessory specialist, Picstop, has relaunched its website, which it claims “sets new benchmarks for online trading in the sector”. A new ‘product finder’ option enables customers to browse tens of thousands of items including cameras, phones, PDAs and camcorders – and instantly provides information about all compatible products such as memory cards, batteries, chargers and cables. And within weeks the new-look site will also allow customers to make instant price comparisons with competitors and access totally independent reviews of its trading efficiency.

Website: Picstop

JP Distribution has announced the new Tilthead Bracket with Locking Shoe Mount from Lastolite. The new bracket, which will be offered alongside the original Tilthead, eatures an adjustable ‘screw locking’ shoe mount, which offers an additional locking mechanism to work alongside the built in method used on the flashgun. The suggested retail price is £22.99.

Website: Lastolite

Hasselblad’s Chief Executive Officer, Christian Poulsen, has left the company. According to Amateur Photographer, Poulsen will remain as the Swedish firm’s Strategic Technology Adviser, but as CEO, he is replaced by Chairman Larry Hansen. Poulsen had founded Imacon in the mid-1990s, and has been leading Hasselblad since the merger of the two companies in 2004. At around that time, Poulsen was quoted as saying, “They finally realized there was no future. It was impossible to keep Hasselblad alive without digital.” Since then Hasselblad has introduced the H1D, H2D, H3D, H3D II and H4D system cameras, among other products aimed at digital photographers.

A selling exhibition of David Bailey’s iconic images of the 1960s will be hosted by Bonhams in New Bond Street. David Bailey’s name is an integral part of the 1960s, and he captured images which remain a pictorial reminder of all that was best about it. The `Pure Sixties. Pure Bailey.’ exhibition will be on view at Bonhams, 101 New Bond Street, from 7th March – 7th April, 2010.

Adobe Photoshop.com Mobile for Android, released on 6 November 2009, is now available globally in all countries with Android Market. Based on customer feedback, this release also includes improvements to the user experience around launching and exiting the application. The Android application equips consumers with quick and easy image-editing tools, colour adjustments and instant photo-sharing capabilities. After making edits on their Android device, users can upload photos from their phone to their Photoshop.com account to view and retrieve their images at a later time from any Internet-connected computer.

Website: Photoshop.com Mobile for Android

Greetings card company, Fluppet.com, is offering photographers, artists, cartoonists and illustrators the opportunity to earn a regular income though royalty payments. There is no cost to submit images and if the pictures are considered suitable, the originator stands to earn 5p each time it is chosen by a Fluppet.com customer.  Professional artists and photographers are also able to licence their work through Fluppet.com.

Transcend has introduced the latest addition to its StoreJet external hard drive lineup, the Transcend StoreJet 35T. About the size of a hardback book, the black streamlined StoreJet 35T offers up to 1.5TB capacity. Its slender design allows it to be placed upright, thus occupying a smaller footprint to save precious desk space. The StoreJet 35T features Transcend’s TurboHDD USB technology that enhances write speeds from 33MB/s to an average of 42MB/s—an increase of nearly 30%. Additionally, the StoreJet 35T bundles with StoreJet Elite software that offers 256-bit AES file and folder encryption with compression options to maximise the storage space and protect data at the same time. The 1TB version has a list price of $195, the 1.5TB variant is available for $264.

Website: Transcend

Those who subscribe to the monthly newsletter of the New York Institute of Photography (NYIP) will receive NYIP’s Three Guidelines and Six Tips for Great Photographs. A colourful collection of ideas and eye-catching photographs that will quickly and easily help photographers take better pictures, the document is available as a PDF download to all new subscribers. To subscribe to the monthly NYIP newsletter and receive the free download of NYIP’s Three Guidelines and Six Tips for Great Photographs, visit the website below.

Website: The New York Institute of Photography

Kenro have released two new ranges of photo frames, Rio and Whisper. The Rio collection features a dark wooden surround with a wide 40mm moulding and is supplied with a white mount. The Whisper frame range is aimed at the photo and gift market. It features a stylish black glass mount with elegant 5mm polished silver surround and is supplied in a gift box. Recommended retail prices of the Rio frames range from £14.90 to £23.90, while the Whisper frames are priced from £9.90 to £17.90.

Website: Kenro

Crash Taylor, recently voted one of the UK’s top ten winter wedding photographers by Professional Photographer magazine, will return to Calumet Nottingham for a wedding photography seminar. Crash is known for his use of location, light, artistic eye and unobtrusive style. The six-hour seminar will take place on Friday 21 May 2010, and is limited to 35 delegates. The cost is £95. To book your place, call 0115 9586888 and refer to the seminar code ZSMNOT0047.

Colour Confidence have teamed up with a number of their key dealer and manufacturer partners to announce the ‘True Colour, True Prints 2’ roadshow. The tour is a perfect opportunity to see the very latest products from onOne Software (Plug-in Suite 5), X-Rite (ColorChecker Passport) and Nik Software (Viveza 2) and will be touring the UK during November and December. ‘True Colour, True Prints 2’ is also a great chance for attendees to enjoy professional face-to-face advice, see product demonstrations and image enhancement techniques, workflow management and all things colour. The ‘True Colour, True Prints 2’ roadshow will be held in a variety of locations around the UK during November and December 2009. For a full overview of venue and date details, visit the website below.

Website: True Colour, True Prints 2

Samsung has announced the STORY Station Plus, its new line-up of 3.5-inch external hard drives featuring an eSATA interface for faster data transfer. The 3-gigabit-per-second, high-performance drives are available in up to 2-terabyte densities. The addition of the eSATA interface raises the data transfer speed of the STORY Station Plus series by more than six-fold when compared with models using a USB 2.0 interface, the company says. Having said that, the Samsung STORY Station Plus does retain the USB 2.0 port alongside the faster eSATA interface, should you need to use it with a USB-only computer. The STORY Station Plus line-up will also feature Samsung’s low standby power design that allegedly reduces the standby power by 96 percent to 0.1 watts from the conventional 2.5W. The STORY Station Plus drives will be available globally by the end of November 2009. The STORY Station Plus features a three-year limited warranty and the 2TB version has a $299 MSRP.

If you have any interesting photos taken with a Lensbaby, now’s your chance to get published! Your shot might become one of a dozen photographs that will illustrate a new book by Lensbaby guru Corey Hilz, due out from Focal Press in the Summer of 2010.  “The book will feature ‘how to’ and inspirational content, along with galleries of Lensbaby photos by some of the foremost Lensbaby photographers in the world,” Lensbaby says. “At least 12 of the submitted images will be featured in the Lensbaby book. Popular voting on the Lensbaby forum will be used to help decide one of the chosen images. Corey Hilz and Craig Strong will pick the remaining images”. You have until the end of the year to submit up to two photos for consideration. Voting will take place from 1 to 7 January 2010 and the selected images will be announced on 15 January.

Website: Lensbaby

Opera Software’s Photo Sharing application turns a folder on your computer into a into a fully functional photo gallery that can be directly accessed by your friends and family, in any Web browser. The Photo Sharing application in Opera Unite is available as part of the free Opera Web browser. All you need to do is download the Opera browser, run the Opera Unite Photo application, designate a folder on your PC or laptop as your photo gallery, and it becomes instantly available to friends and family via the World Wide Web, without your having to wait long hours for the photos to upload.

Website: Opera

Data Robotics has introduced the five-bay Drobo S with eSATA, a professional-class storage solution designed for Windows, Mac, and Linux users who require high-speed data transfers and reliable data storage. Thanks to the improvements, the Drobo S is claimed to offer 150 percent of the performance of the current four-bay Drobo. Built on Data Robotics’ BeyondRAID virtualised storage platform, which eliminates the lock-in of traditional RAID configurations, the Drobo S features a one-click toggle between single- and dual-drive redundancy and provides protection against up to two concurrent drive failures. Drobo S is currently available starting at a price of $799 MSRP, with multiple configurations to $1,799 for a 10TB (5x 2TB) solution.

Website: Drobo S

The Mail Tribune is now accepting submissions for its annual Oregon Outdoors Wild Bird Photo Contest. Open to everyone from long-time birders, to amateur photographers, to nature enthusiasts, the Oregon Outdoors Wild Bird Photo Contest invites participants to capture the beauty of their feathered friends in their natural habitats. Participants may enter as many bird photos as they like, but will only be eligible to win one award. All submissions must be accompanied by a completed entry form. Submissions will be accepted through 4:00 pm on 11 December 2009. Full contest rules, as well as submission guidelines and entry forms, are available online at the website below.

Website: Wild Bird Photo Contest