Entry call for 10th Pano Awards…Canon DSLRs disabled…300 million ‘free’ pics in CC Search…$4000+ Canon RF 85mm f1.2 in June…
ENTRY CALL FOR 10TH PANO AWARDS
Professional and amateur photographers around the world are invited to enter The 10th Epson International Pano Awards to compete for $50,000 in cash and prizes.
Early-bird entries are open until Monday July 1, with entry fee discounts on offer.
The Epson Pano Awards, as the name implies, is all about panoramic photography. It’s the largest competition for panoramic photography in the world and in 2018 there were 4937 images submitted from 1251 photographers in 74 countries.
Advances in digital photography and editing software have resulted in an ever-increasing rise in the popularity of image stitching and thus panoramic format prints.
The 2019 competition is open to all professional and amateur photographers with a combined pool
of more than US$50,000, including $12,000 cash. Prizes include an Epson SureColor P7070 printer, an Epson SureColor P5070 printer, an Epson EB1776 ultra-slim projector and a Nikon D850 camera.
The judging panel includes some of the world’s top photographers and industry professionals, including
Adam Williams, William Long, Isabella Tabacchi, Bill Bailey, Mark Gray, Aaron Spence, Chris
Collacott, Abe Blair, Timothy Poulton, Sean Davey, Juan Pablo de Miguel, Anna Gibiskys and
Ayrton Camargo.
CANON DISABLES 3RD PARTY FLASH COMPATIBILITY
Canon has been copping a bit of flack in international online photo media with the relevation it has quietly dropped the standard centre pin on its flash hotshoe connection for its consumer DSLR range, including the Canon EOS 1500D, 3000D and 200D II.
This effectively locks consumers into purchasing a Canon Speedlite rather than a flash unit from a third party manufacturer. It also renders flash triggers inoperative.
Until now, the familiar centre pin on all camera brands has provided the connection to trigger the flash unit, regardless of brand.
If the objective was to eliminate competition in flash units – where Canon Speedlites costs around twice as much as equivalent third party units – it has not succeeded: Chinese lighting manufacturer Godox has already developed a firmware workaround to enable its flash units (V860IIC, X1T-C, TT350C, and V350C) to operate on the disabled Canons.
Here’s a video from photography vlogger ‘Mike the Maven’ which broke the story. https://www.youtube.com/embed/08ZmFclDaKE
So far Canon has not made any comment on the issue.
‘FREE’ 300 MIL IMAGE ARCHIVE FROM CREATIVE COMMONS
A new collection of 300 million ‘free ‘images became available via the internet with nonprofit operation Creative Commons making its archive available via an internal search engine.
The search engine offers free content from public domain searches and includes images from New York Public Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art and even Museums Victoria, although the vast majority (about 290 million of the 300 million) come from Flickr. Search filters include ‘Images which can be Modified or Adapted’ and ‘Images for Commercial Use’.
‘CC Search searches across more than 300 million images from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset. It goes beyond simple search to aggregate results across multiple public repositories into a single catalog, and facilitates reuse through features like machine-generated tags and one-click attribution,’ the CC Search website explains.
Creative Commons had almost 60,000 users per month search its site in early 2017 and that figure will be massively boosted now that the collection is so easy to search and use.
Unfortunately, one has to read the fine print to understand that not everything in CC Search is actually free – even though that’s a conclusion users could easily come to: ‘Please note that CC does not verify whether the images are properly CC licensed, or whether the attribution and other licensing information we have aggregated is accurate or complete. Please independently verify the licensing status and attribution information before reusing the content.’
CC Search: https://search.creativecommons.org\
$4000+ CANON RF 85MM F1.2 IN JUNE
Canon has announced June availability of the fifth lens for its EOS R full-frame morrorless series, the RF 85mm f/1.2L USM. With a US price of $2699, the direct Aussie dollar equivalent, with 10 percent GST added, would be $4259!
The RF 85mm f/1.2L USM is an ideal lens for portraiture, particularly with the wide f1.2 aperture. Highest optical performance…yadda yadda…beautiful bokeh…
It includes a lens control ring for manual control of settings and is weather sealed. Minimum focussing distance is 85 centimetres. It is sold with a cylindrical lens hood.
Canon has flagged five more RF lenses this year, all bar one in the premium L-series.
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