Photo Iconic is offering a number of image workshops at Intrepid Travel and Jacobs Digital Photo & Video, London. Two of these, Shooting People & Places (23 April) and Shooting Landscapes & Wildlife (30 April) will take place at Intrepid Travel, 76 Upper St, Islington; whereas two others - Shooting Travel: The Perfect Kit and Shooting Travel Images That Sell - will be held at Jacobs Digital Photo & Video in May. Each course costs £40 - and all participants will receive a £25 discount voucher for future selected Photo Iconic photography courses plus either £50 worth of discount vouchers from Intrepid Travel or special discount vouchers from Jacobs Digital Photo & Video, depending on the course venue.

Website: Shooting People & Places Booking Form
Website: Shooting Landscapes & Wildlife Booking Form

Panasonic has updated the firmware of the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FS15 compact digital camera. Version 1.2 promises “improved image quality”.

Website: Panasonic Lumix DMC-FS15 Firmware Update Service

Ricoh has released a function-enhancing firmware update for the Ricoh GR Digital II professional digital compact camera. Version 2.30 gives the GR Digital II a number of fairly significant functional enhancements, including the following:

(1)  It is now possible to manually set the flash amount
(2)  It is now possible to set the flash timing
(3)  It is now possible to register white balance compensation in My Settings
(4)  The TODAY’S SHOTS display function has been added

Click through / read on to read about these functions in detail.

Website: Firmware Download Page
Review: Read our in-depth review of the Ricoh GR Digital II

Olympus has issued a firmware update for the Olympus FE-45 digital compact camera. Version 1.2 of the FE-45 firmware improves compatibility with nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries. As usual with Olympus cameras, you can update your camera’s firmware through Olympus Master or Olympus Studio.

Website: Firmware Update Instructions

The Photography.Book.Now International Juried Competition today announced prize packages for all levels of achievement in its photography book competition. Prizes will be awarded to the most creative and innovative photography books in three categories –Fine Art, Editorial, and Commercial. The grand prize winner gets $25,000. Click through / read on to learn what the category winners and runners-up are going to receive.

Rankin Live! is a radical twist on the traditional exhibition format featuring two shows in one. These include Shoot Me Rankin, the ongoing photo shoot of 1000 Britons, whose portraits will be immediately included in the exhibition, and Rankin Retrospective, a collection of 600 images selected from a vast portfolio of work. Both Shoot Me Rankin and Rankin Retrospective will be hosted by Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, London, between 31 July – 18 September.

It’s Earth Day today, and the founders of earthmosaic.org are asking you to “scoot out and get some awesome pictures of YOUR Earth”, and upload them so that they can become part of a huge photo mosaic. All pictures have to be taken today, 22 April 2009, as it occurs in the country where you are right now, and need to be uploaded by 30 April. The photos must be taken digitally and have their EXIF intact, but the capturing device can be anything from a cell phone camera to a professional DSLR - it doesn’t matter. Make sure to upload only JPEGs that have been downsized to 500 kilobytes maximum.

Website: Earth Mosaic

Nature’s Best magazine has an ongoing photography competition, which is open for entries until 4 May 2009. The annual Windland Smith Rice International Awards programme evolved from the magazine’s mission of celebrating the beauty and diversity of nature through the art of photography to become one of the world’s greatest nature photography competitions boasting over 20,000 entries each year. There are 17 categories to choose from, and you can submit up to 20 entries. The entry fee is $25. The main reason for entering this competition is that the winning images will be featured in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in an exhibition dedicated to Nature’s Best Photography. The winning images will also be featured in the Fall issue of Nature’s Best, and in featured online galleries on AOL.com and MSNBC.com.

Website: Guidelines and entry form

International Garden Photographer of the Year has announced the theme for its annual Early Bird summer competition. This year’s theme is “In Full Bloom.” The deadline is 30 June 2009. The judges will then look through all entries received up to that date and decide which ones fit the theme best. All entries will go through automatically to the main International Garden Photographer of the Year competition, whose deadline is 30 November. Meanwhile, an exhibition of photos submitted to last year’s competition will be on display at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, from May to September 2009.

Website: Enter the competition

Sports Illustrated: SLIDE SHOW is a new book that showcases more than 50 years of sports action. Culled from the magazine’s archives of more than 750,000 original slides, the photos prove that if every picture captures a moment, every slide recounts the complete back story. The notations along the border of each slide describe that image’s journey from playing field to publication. Beyond revealing how the slides evolved into SI cover shots and magazine pages, the book recounts anecdotes and offers rare insights from the world’s greatest sports photographers, including Walter Iooss Jr., Neil Leifer and Heinz Kluetmeier. SLIDE SHOW, which retails for $29.95 U.S./$32.95 Canada (Hardcover), will be available beginning May 5, 2009.

The Travel Photographer of the Year 2009 competition is now open for entries. Any photographer, amateur and professional, aged 17 years and over from any country can enter the three Portfolio categories and the One Shot category. The New Talent, First Shot and Young travel Photographer of the Year categories all have restrictions on entry as follows: New Talent is for photographic students, amateur or semi-professional photographers only. First Shot category is for amateur photographers only. Young Travel Photographer of the Year is for photographers aged 16 and under. Entries close on 22nd September 2009. The entry fee is £15 for each portfolio category, £20 for New Talent, £10 for One Shot and First Shot and free for Young Travel Photographer of the Year.

According to Kodak, Brits spent a staggering £600million on printer ink in 2008. The American giant has recently launched a campaign “against rip-off ink prices”, claiming that on average a consumer would save £75 a year by switching to an all-in-one printer with allegedly high quality, low cost ink. Click through / read on to find out what else they have to say.

On 24 April, Blurb will be hosting two webinars on creating / designing photo books. Both sessions are free, with the first session aimed at newbies and the second session at more advanced Blurb users. Advance registration is required. After that, you’ll receive an email with a link to join the webinar. When the scheduled time comes, just follow this link then watch and listen to the presentation on your computer.

Samsung have unveiled a new, rugged hard drive for mobile computing, available in capacities of up to 500GB. The Spinpoint M7 is available in 250-, 320-, 400-, 500-GB capacities. A new controller has been adopted to reduce power consumption in seek mode to up to 25 percent over conventional 2.5” drives. The Samsung Spinpoint M7 hard drive features a 5400rpm spindle speed, 8MB cache, native command queuing and a 3.0Gbps SATA interface. Global shipments in the United States and Europe began in April with shipments to other regions to follow accordingly. Pricing is to be confirmed.

Light Crafts, creators of LightZone, have just announced a new photo editing program called Aurora. The company is making the bold claim that it is so intuitive to use it enables “anyone to go from download to expert in a matter of minutes”. Additionally, there is an optional on-line back-up service powered by amazon.com - users can simply hit “online back up” from within Aurora to sync directly with their Amazon storage account. Aurora is available for $19.95, on-line back-up plans start from $4.95 per month.

Western Digital have released the newest addition to their enterprise family of hard drives to include 2TB capacity. Billed as “the largest and only 2 TB enterprise-class hard drive shipping today”, the Western Digital RE4-GP allegedly yields twice the processing power resulting in as much as 25 percent performance improvement over the previous generation. Addressing the growing high-capacity enterprise market, WD RE4-GP 2 TB drives are reliability-rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF (mean time before failure) in high duty cycle environments. MSRP is $329.00 (U.S.).

Visible Dust have launched Zeeion, a new anti-static non-contact dust removal device for DSLR cameras. The new Zeeion compliments Visible Dust’s Arctic Butterfly in the dust removal stage of the sensor cleaning workflow. Zeeion is made from Silicon-RX - a unique compound with an anti-static property. When squeezed, the air emitted is negatively charged – it neutralises the positive charge on the sensor, making dust removal easier and actually helping to prevent re-attraction of dust particles. The new VisibleDust Zeeion is available now at RRP £39.95.

The Art of Photography Show, an international photo exhibition which will take place 29 August through 1 November, is now open for entries. Images created via any form of photography will be accepted for consideration , so long as part of the image is photographically created. The total worth of the awards is $10,000, up from $5,000 last year. Do note that there is an entry fee, which is $25 for the first entry, and $10 for each additional entry.