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.