Deadlines are approaching for several competitions that give you a chance to have your work seen by photo editors, curators, and others in the industry.

Magenta Foundation Flash Forward 2012
Open to US, UK and Canadian photographers under the age of 34. Winners and honorable mentions will be published in the catalogue of the competition, and be featured in June at an exhibition in Boston and at the biennial Flash Forward festival in Toronto in October. The winner of the Bright Spark Award will receive $5,000.
Fee: $50 US and Canada; £40 UK
Judges: Julien Beaupré Ste-Marie, Photo Editor, enRoute Magazine; Erin Elder, Manager, Business Development & Partnerships, Digital Media, The Globe & Mail; J.J. Kegan McFadden, Director/Curator; PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts; Erin Stump, Erin Stump Projects; Diane Smyth, British Journal of Photography, London; Stefanie Braun, Senior Curator, Photographers’ Gallery; Francesca Sears, Director of Profile, Panos Pictures; Holly Stuart Hughes, Editor, Photo District News; Daniel Cooney, Daniel Cooney Fine Art; Paul Moakley, Deputy Photo Editor, TIME; Lisa Botos, 0oi Botos Gallery, Hong Kong; Sujong Song, independent curator and publisher, Korea
Deadline: Dec. 31, 2011
www.magentafoundation.org/submissions/submit.php?project=11

Center for Photography Woodstock’s Photography Now
Winners will be exhibited at the Center for Photography at Woodstock’s main gallery from March 10 to April 22, 2012. Fee: $50 for 6 images ($30 student/senior; proof of status required); $60 for 10 images; $100 for 20 images.
Judge: Natasha Egan, director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College in Chicago.
Deadline: Jan. 20, 2011.
cpw.org/CurrentOpportunities/PhotoNow/pages/PhotoNow_EXH.html

World Press Photo 2012 Multimedia Contest
Open to production teams who have produced or first published a multimedia production in 2011 of up to 20 minutes in length with a journalistic storyline and professional still photography.
Judges: To be announced.
Deadline: Register by January 25, 2012
multimedia.worldpressphoto.org/

The PDN Photo Annual
Winners of this juried competition are featured in the June issue of PDN and on PDNOnline; more than $15,000 in cash and prizes available. Entrants have the opportunity to submit work to the Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture, which comes with a $15,000 prize. Photographers will also be chosen for the Marty Forscher Fellowship Fund prize and the Sony Emerging Photographer Award.
Fee: $45 single entry; $55 for series; $25 for students; discounts for PhotoServe Members.
Judges: So far, they include fine art dealers, ad agency creatives, magazine photo editors; a preliminary list  can be found at http://www.pdnphotoannual.com/index.shtml.
Deadline: Jan 25, 2012.
www.pdnphotoannual.com/

American Photography/American Illustration
Winners are included in the annual large-format AI-AP books distributed to art directors, photo editors, designers and art buyers.
Judges: To be announced in January.
Deadline: Jan. 27, 2012
www.ai-ap.com/cfe/

2012 CENTER Awards
There are three awards, and each include different prizes and selection criteria.
Project Competition: Honors photographers working on documentary and fine-art series.
Prizes: $10,000 cash, an exhibition at Center, publication in Fraction magazine, admission to Review Santa Fe.
Fee: $35 members/$45 nonmembers.
Judges:  Greg Hobson, Curator of Photographs, National Media Museum (UK); Paul Moakley, deputy photo editor, TIME;  Christopher Steighner, Senior Editor, Rizzoli Publications Inc.

Project Launch: Honors works in progress.
Prizes: $5,000 cash, exhibition, publication in Fraction magazine, admission to Review Santa Fe and more.
Fee: $25 members/$35 nonmembers
Judge: Virginia Heckert, Associate Curator, J. Paul Getty Museum

Choice Awards: The annual awards for outstanding photographs in three categories.
Prizes: Exhibition at CENTER, publication in Fraction magazine, gift certificate to Singer Editions fine-art printing.
Judges: Ashley Givens, assistant curator, Victoria & Albert Museum (Curator’s Choice); Jamie Wellford, senior photo editor, Newsweek Daily Beast (Editor’s Choice); Stephanie Braun, senior curator, The Photographer’s Gallery
Fee: $25 members/$35 nonmembers; or enter all three categories for $60 members/$75 nonmembers

Deadlines for all three competitions: Jan. 30, 2012
www.centeryourcareer.org/2012/center/awards/faq-general.html

POYi has put out a call for entries for its 69th annual photojournalism competition. Online registration and entry will be open through January 12, 2012, contest organizers say.

POYi has added a new Sports Division, which will include new categories for Sports Photographer of the Year, as well as categories for Sports Multimedia and Sports Editing.

This year’s competition will include two special categories to recognize the work of photographers who documented the Arab Uprisings and the Japan Earthquake.

The Missouri School of Journalism will host the judging in a public forum from February 8 to February 28.

For more information about POYi and details about the competitions see http://poyi.org/.

Two university professors specializing in intellectual property law are conducting what could be an intriguing study of “creativity among photographers.” To get photographers to participate in their survey, they’ve launched a nature photo contest for professional photographers. Those who participate will be paid $10, and will be eligible for a prize which may include $1,000 in cash and publication on the Huffington Post Web site.

The researchers are Christopher Sprigman, a professor at the University of Virginia’s school of law, and Chistopher Buccafusco, an assistant professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Chicago-Kent College of Law.

They have asked us not to disclose the exact purpose of the study, to avoid skewing the results. But they have cleared the study with UVA’s Internal Review Board (a research ethics committee). They have also promised to share their results when the study is completed, and convinced PDN that the findings may be of particular interest to our readers.

Moreover, photographers who participate will be debriefed about the study and its exact purpose immediately after they complete the study questionnaire, Sprigman says — no need to wait for the results to be published.

To participate in the study, click here.

Sprigman expects the study to be completed by August. We will share the results with PDN readers when he and Buccafusco make them available.

The 2011 Critical Mass Top 50 were announced last night by Photolucida, the organization that runs the competition. Each year hundreds of photographers submit their work for judging to a panel of 200 photo industry professionals. (51 photographers are included in this year’s Top 50 due to a tie in voting.)

Photographers in the Top 50 are eligible for several prizes, including a book award that supports one photographer’s book publication; a solo show at Blue Sky gallery in Portland, Oregon; or one of five scholarships for international photographers.

Images by the Critical Mass Top 50 photographers will also be included in a traveling exhibition that will tour the West Coast in Spring 2012. Starting in February 2012 the exhibition will be at Photo Center NW in Seattle, then in April at Newspace Center for Photography in Portland, and concluding in May at RayKo Photo Center in San Francisco.

Check out the work of the 2011 Critical Mass Top 50 here.

Read a list of this year’s jurors here. (PDN creative director Darren Ching, PDN senior editor Conor Risch and Jill Waterman, editor of PDNEdu were among this year’s jurors.)

The Magenta Foundation is now accepting submissions to its 2012 Emerging Photographers Competition. Winners and honorable mentions will have their work published in the Magenta Foundation catalogue and exhibited at the Flash Forward Festival events, to be held in Boston in June and in Toronto in October.  One photographer will be chosen for the Flash Forward Bright Spark award, which comes with a cash prize of $5,000.

The competition is open to photographers 34 years of age and under who are working in Canada, the US and the UK. The deadline to enter is December 31, 2011.

The international jury is made up of photo editors, curators, editors, a photo agency director, and a publisher working in Canada, the US, the UK, Hong Kong and Korea.

Submission requirements, instructions for uploading photos and a list of jurors can be found at magentafoundation.org/submissions/ff2012.

The National Portrait Gallery has announced a portrait competition that has stirred the outrage of at least one photographer (who told us about it) because of the rights transfer terms of the contest rules.

Rights transfers in photography contests are often a lightning rod, but the rules of this contest are more complicated than “we own everything you submit.” (more…)

PDN‘s World in Focus contest closes tonight at midnight PST.

You can win prizes, gear, and see you work featured in PDN and at PhotoPlus Expo. There are Professional and Amateur channels to enter:  www.worldinfocuscontest.com

While you’re there, take a look at the latest entries:
www.worldinfocuscontest.com/entries.shtml

© Valerio Spada

Valerio Spada of Milan, Italy has won the $25,000 grand prize in the fourth annual Photography Book Now competition, sponsored by Blurb, for his book  Gomorrah Girl. The book, which explores life in Naples among the Camorrah (the local name for the Mafia), was chosen by a panel of jurors from among more than 2,300 entries. Spada’s book and 12 other winners in several categories will be exhibited starting September 15 at the Aperture Gallery in New York City.

The Photography Book Now contest, now in its fourth year, honors creativity and innovation in self-published photo books.  Gomorrah Girl was not published using the Blurb publishing platform.

“Mr. Spada’s self-published book is a strong embodiment of the complex criteria the judges used: strong photography, important subject matter, vigorous edit and intelligent sequencing, combined with a thoughtful attention to those elements that are specifically book-centric,” says  Darius Himes, lead judge for the competition.

The category winners are:

Fine Art
Rene Nuijens, Yuri Gagarin: 50 Years of Human Space Flight
Documentary
Rafal Milach, In The Car With R
Travel
Thomas Michael Alleman, Sunshine & Noir
Student
Goseong Choi, Umma

The People’s Choice winners are:
Fine Art
Zoltan Vansco, Unintended Light
Documentary
Peter Irmai, Summer Garden (Sommergarten)
Travel
Idan Hojman, Along the River
Student
Ian Waelder, Circus Life

A full list of winners, including runners up and honorable mention selections, can be found at the Photography Book Now site.

Related stories:
Judith Stenneken Wins Photography Book Now Prize

How to Distribute Your Self-Published Book

Self Publishing Done Right

In 2012 The Aftermath Project will award a $20,000 grant to a photographer exploring the lasting effects of conflicts on civilian populations. The work of the grant winners and four finalists will be published in the sixth volume of War is Only Half the Story, the book published annually by The Aftermath Project. Applications for the 2012 grants are now being accepted (click here to download a PDF of the application). Applications must be received by November 1, 2011.

In the call for applications, Aftermath Project founder Sara Terry noted that in the project’s five years of existence, “almost all the proposals we have received (with a few exceptions) have been about the dangers of post-conflict situations, full of (warranted) concerns about often depressing conditions. Those are important projects, and I’m proud that we have recognized many of them. But as we enter our sixth year of granting, I would like to add another note to the conversation. For me, from the beginning, covering the aftermath of conflict has also always included an interest in better understanding the human spirit in conditions such as these – I remember being absolutely confounded by the Bosnian Muslims I met who were determined to go back to the homes from which Bosnian Serb neighbors had chased them away (and worse) during the war. I wanted to try to understand where that spirit comes from, how it survives, and perhaps why it offers hope that humanity can rise again despite the most hateful of conflicts.”

The Aftermath Project is funded by donations from institutions and individuals, and does not charge an application fee.

Related stories:
Davide Monteleone Wins 2011 Aftermath Grant

Guinness record holder Jason Groupp appears to have survived a challenge to his world best mark of lighting 300 flashes in a single photo.

According to a least one published report, an attempt was made to break Groupp’s controversial record this past week in a public square in the northern Hungarian town of Eger.

Apparently, Mother Nature may have played a part in the failed effort. Or maybe the record was, in fact, broken but Guinness was not on hand to verify the feat. (Scattered news reports are still coming in and being translated by our crack team of linguists.)

From this Google-translated blog:

“Unfortunately, time was not kind to us, because when the rehearsal began, the rain burst (in a few minutes after our arrival). The villanj pears and only then, but diligently shining. A few minutes later I poured properly, had to hurry. The distributors have ensured that the power villanj pears to have swam in the rain water, but it worked well.”

Groupp did not seem worried that his record was in jeopardy. “Looks like someone ‘tried’ to break my Guinness World record,” he bragged on Facebook. “I think this record is safe for a little while.”

In May, the New York-based Groupp attracted the admiration (and ire) of his fellow photographers when he harnessed the power of 300 small strobes to light a group portrait at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati. The photograph broke the Guinness record for most flashes used in an image.

Could this emerging rivalry become the Kobayashi vs. Joey Chestnut of the small strobe lighting world? Time will only tell.