One City, Many Destinations Photo Contest — travel photography competition from CITY Magazine. Submission deadline June 30, 2007.

Hey, Hot Shot! is accepting entries for their Spring 2007 competition. Winners are featured in Jen Bekman’s gallery and on her website.

Jörg Colberg: What makes a great photo?

Sharpcast has launched their photo sharing and syncing service. The biggest benefit that I see is the ability to automatically sync your photo library among multiple PCs (as well as having a backup of your photos on the Sharpcast servers). Sharpcast also provides the ability to share photos with others, comment, and chat, but to me that stuff is secondary — I’d rather share my photos on my blog or Flickr. The biggest missing piece right now appears to be support for raw format — currently they only support jpeg, but raw support is supposedly coming soon.

One of my photographic heroes has long been Benjamin Mendlowitz, well known for his beautiful photographs of classic boats on the Maine coast. I’ve never known much about him, but have enjoyed his work in WoodenBoat magazine, and the annual Calendar of Wooden Boats. Mendlowitz has the ability to photograph traditional New England boats (yachts and working boats) in a way that uniquely captures their beauty.

I finally got a chance to look through the March issue of Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors, and there’s a nice profile of Mendlowitz (not available online, unfortunately), along with some of his work. There is, however, an informative interview with him, and some samples of his work, on the ASMP site:

I try to use the quality of the natural light to distinguish my work from others in the marine field. Unlike most other marine photographers, I shy away from extreme wide angle or telephoto lenses that add visual impact to the shots at the expense of distorting the true shape and proportions of the subject boats. Instead I look for my visual impact in the lighting, dramatic clouds and seas or the golden light of early morning and late evening, while showing the subject boat in its true form with a normal to portrait lens.

Intruiging HDR (High Dynamic Range) photographs from underground Moscow, including subway, road, and other tunnels.

Kristopher Tate has posted a screen shot of the new version of Zooomr coming next month. Some interesting links that are not in the current version show up: Zipline, Groups, Archives, Marketplace, Storefront, Analytics. The ability to market your photography via Zooomr could be quite interesting — Thomas Hawk has mentioned several times their goal of making Zooomr a place where photographers could sell stock photos.

Ars Technica reviews Adobe Lightroom:

Lightroom innovates in its own way by providing a mother lode of intuitive adjustments, many ways to navigate and tag a huge library of images and it does it with speed to spare. The crazy wealth of toggles, presets, snapshots, metadata filtering techniques, history states, etc. ensures that you’re not going to be looking for a workaround while trying to work quickly and these things don’t overlap to the point of taking up space needlessly.

Welcome to photofilter.org. There’s not much here yet, but please come back again as I get this thing going, and get the kinks out of this site.