Aug. 19, 1839: Photography Goes Open Source
(Wired)
On 19 August 1839, Frenchman Louis Daguerre, after receiving a lifetime pension from his government revealed the secrets of his daguerreotypes. After that, 'no one wanted to have a portrait painted; everyone wanted a daguerreotype. Studios opened all over Paris. "Daguerreotypomania" spread from Paris to the rest of France, then across the continent, across the channel to England and across the Atlantic to America'. US-based magazine Wired has an interesting series of short articles on the major leaps in the history of photography.

At Beijing Olympics, Photographers Shine
(NPR)
For one Olympic competition, such as the 400 meters, Getty Images' photographer Michael Steele starts preparing more than four hours before the start of the race. He tells NPR how he has to anticipate how athletes might celebrate a victory. 'Sometimes they don't even celebrate, and then you're thinking '"There's no picture there! Why haven't you celebrated?" But generally in an Olympic final, they do something.' Also: Read BJP's interview of Jude Edginton, who shot Britain's young hopefuls on their home turf.

+As Patrick Demarchelier prepares to open a retrospective exhibition in Paris, The Daily Telegraph interviewed the photographer who has grown tired of 'what he describes as today's "perfection-obsessed" society and the photographers and image-makers who "want to turn all women into models".' Asked who he would love to shoot, Demarchelier, famous for his Princess Diana's photographs, answers: the Duchess of Cornwall. 'I'd love to do her, but she would be very hard to photograph because she's not photogenic. She's got an interesting face, but I'd need a lot of time with her because I haven't seen any pictures of her where she looks beautiful. Rather than ask her to my studio, I would go to her house and make sure she felt really comfortable and confident. Then I'd get her to laugh - really laugh.' Read the interview here.

+An Associated Press photographer was arrested at the Republican National Convention while covering protests. Matt Rourke was in St Paul, Minnesota, when he was covering the 'unrully end to an otherwise peaceful anti-war protest,' the Committee to Protect Journalists reports. 'Covering news is a constitutionally protected activity, and covering a riot is part of that coverage,' said David Ake, an AP assistant bureau chief in Washington. A broadcast crew and host for Democracy Now! were also arrested. Full story here.

+MSN Money won't be in professional photographers' good books. In its regular '10 ways to get yourself a pay rise' column, it advices its readers to top up their income with a little bit on the side. 'Maybe one of your hobbies or interests could generate a handy second income. If, for example you're a keen (and good enough) photographer you could have a nice little earner on your hands working Saturdays as a wedding photographer'. Last July, we wrote that wedding photographers were seeing their income shrink. I wonder if MSN Money has the solution for them.

+Magnum Photos is celebrating Eve Arnold with a special exhibition at the Magnum London Print Room on Gee Street. The Independent has a profile of the photographer who was the first woman to join the photo agency and who followed Marilyn Monroe for ten years until her death. The photographer Elliott Erwitt said of her that 'she had a way of getting on with people, the mighty and the modest, in a way that was quite extraordinary. Photographers often keep a distance [from their subjects] but she didn't. She became part of the lives of many of the people she photographed. Maybe her size had something to do with the way she worked with people. She was a tiny, unaggressive kind of person who you wanted to pick up and be nice to.' Read the full story here.

It was inky, it was grimy, it was disarmingly acute - Shoreditch Twat. Originally launched in 1999 as a club listings guide it soon mushroomed into an in-house magazine for the East End scene, satirising and celebrating the new breed of meeja luvvies in all their glory and excess years before Nathan Barley got there. It lasted for four years and 31 issues, surviving three libel threats and 16 defamation of character charges.
Now it's back, in a phoenix-like rebirth (or perhaps ratlike refusal to die), with an exhibition in - where else - Hoxton Square. Never Knowingly Understood opens at KK Outlet on 04 December at 7pm, and runs until 31 December.

Image © Jonathan Hyams

Nan Goldin has picked out Newport graduate and BJP reader Jonathan Hyams to win the Ctrl.Alt.Shift photography prize.
The prize, run by Vice Magazine on behalf of Christian Aid, offered young photographers £1000, a DSLR, an exhibition and the chance to work with one of five volunteer mentors. Hyams is now working with Andy Capper, editor of Vice.
Photographers were invited to submit images focusing on Gender, Power and Poverty, and Hyam’s winning image depicts a young Zimbabwean sex worker in Mozambique. The number of migrants illegally crossing the border into Mozambique has escalated wildly since the highly contested Zimbabwe elections. Male immigrants often work in illegal gold mines, while young women sell sex for less than the price of a local beer, several times a night, in order to send money home.
‘The women cross just over the border to a car park, where they work,’ said Hyams. ‘They exchange the money for maize or vegetable oil, both of which are now used as money in Zimbabwe, or into any hard currency they can get their hands on.
‘I won the Hello! Young Photographer’s Award earlier this year and used the £5000 prize to invest in a mobile lighting kit and go back to Africa,’ he added. ‘Photographically it was a change of direction, so it’s great that’s it’s been well received.’
Capper told BJP he had been ‘blown away’ by both the quality and number of entries to the competition. ‘We expected around 500 entries but we got 1000, and were very surprised at the quality,’ he says. ‘Young photographers are really putting themselves on the line to produce high-quality photojournalism.’
Capper now intends to work with Hyams, who graduated from the University of Newport in 2007, in future editions of Vice. Hyams entered the Ctrl.Alt.Shift prize at Vice’s stand at Vision, BJP's event for young photographers.

In an illuminating New York Times article (that begins with an interesting take on the Flickr generation), Noam Cohen reports on two examples of how photography archives are working with user-generated community websites to add to their research. In return for free usage of pictures (to accompany, for example, a Wikipedia entry), the archives are taking advantage of the site visitors’ collective knowledge, to add historical data to pictures and generate new debate.

Simon Hoegsberg, a 32-year-old photographer from Denmark, thinks his 100 meter long (and 78cm wide) image might be.

We're All Gonna Die - 100 meters of existence is a montage featuring 178 people, all shot from the same spot over 20 days on Warschauer Bridge in Berlin.

His aim, he says, was to capture "the uniqueness of 'ordinary' people". And if you scroll along it on his website, you certainly come across some interesting characters.

He shot the portraits in the summer of 2007, and has spent the last 17 months making the montage. Looking at his website, it's typical of the kind of work he does – often involving some kind of formal framework for an inquisitive exploration of humanity or national identity, sometimes involving a journey or typology.

My favourite series are his Low-fat diaries - a 1700km journey across Europe armed with a camera, a notebook and just 14 Euros - and Copenhagen / Istanbul - a 3500km journey using free transport courtesy of the Danish capital's bicycle scheme in search of "the goodness in people".

I like the contrast in these two diary entries from the latter project:

Day1 I have cycled 90 kilometers. I’m sitting at a Shell gas station six kilometers from Vordingborg (a town not far from the Danish/German border). A couple of minutes ago a man carrying three empty Tuborg beer bottles went into the shop. He came out again carrying three new bottles. He’s drinking his bottle with a fat lady with no front teeth and a fat boy who could be their son. An equally fat guy holding a French hotdog in his left hand frowned at me when passing me in his car. In the rear window of his car a big hand made of fabric was giving the finger to people driving behind him. I didn’t ask myself to shake my head. My head shook automatically. They’re all Danes.

Day 30 Bulgaria is a wonderful country. The country where I’ve felt most welcome of the eight countries I have traveled through. I was a jerk this morning. I woke up in a town, but did not buy food or water for the trip through the mountains to Sofia. I imagined I’d come across a restaurant on the way. After cycling and wheeling the bike ten kilometers I was dehydrated and weakened from hunger. A boy and three adults were approaching me on their bikes. I held a hand in the air. They stopped. I asked them “Is there a restaurant in the mountains”? They said “No”. A young woman who was part of the group stopped the car she was driving. She exchanged a couple of words with the group, got out of the car, pushed the driver’s seat forward and crossed the road carrying a white plastic bag in her hand. She said, “These are some croissants for your trip”. The eldest man of the family asked me if I wanted some water. I exclaimed a long-drawn sound that meant yes. The woman asked me a question, and while I was answering it the man gave me two bottles of water. When the group had left, I ate the three vacuum-packed croissants one after the other. I drank one of the two bottles of water, smoked a cigarette and caught myself shaking my head in reaction to what had happened. The family itself didn’t seem to be proud of having helped me. For them it was only natural. Three croissants, big deal! For me it was a stroke of luck but no miracle. The Bulgarians are like that. That is what I’m trying to say.

Check out the rest of the diaries, and Simon's other projects, here.

...can you shoot successful travel photography? It could be closer than you think. As travel photographers and libraries such as View Pictures and PMCA explain in our special issue on travel this week, shots of London and the UK can be big sellers. But just what you shoot is another matter. Stock photographer Peter Phipp recommends shooting the icons, while View picture editor Kate Ledwith advises picking a specialism (in View's case architecture) and shooting it well.
I think there's more mileage in the latter approach, particularly when amateur photographers, who shoot the usual suspects so well, can now sell them so easily online. And it seems I'm not the only one. Chris Coe, organiser of the Travel Photographer of the Year, and the art directors of Wallpaper and Conde Nast Traveller all agree, recommending in our other special features this week that photographers develop an individual eye, whether shooting at home or abroad.

Image © Lawrence Schiller

'It's all been a bit of an eye-opener' commented our writer Lucy Davies on her article on Lawrence Schiller, and who can blame her. Schiller made his name in the 1960s with a project on acid freaks that, even now, disturbs. Women with dirty feet laugh hysterically on the sofa, women losing their minds cry - apparently unheeded - on the floor. 'When my husband and I want to take a trip together,' commented one subject. 'I just put a little acid in the kids' orange juice in the morning and let them spend the day freaking out in the woods.'

But if his subjects were losing it, Schiller was not. He kept a clear head in the druggiest parties, and used sheer ingenuity to win his first big commission. Life magazine was unwilling to run anything on LSD because there was no scientific data on it, so Schiller persuaded Time to run a story on the drug's medical properties then went back to Life. It's a timely reminder for today's recession-hit photographers - pitching for work sometimes means overcoming rejection and refusing to take no for an answer. Read all about it in this week's BJP - it's free online.

And also free online are: a Canon EOS 5D MkII vs Nikon D3x shootout, a Sigma 50mm lens test, an investigation of ophthalmic photography and a profile of an ad campaign by Nick Simpson. Enjoy!

Photography specialist and BJP contributor Sue Steward published a really interesting and I'd say very moving article in The Observer magazine on Sunday.
A meditation on photographing her mother after the older woman's death, it included references to Annie Leibovitz (who photographed Susan Sontag after her death) and Japanese photographer Miyako Ishiuchi (who photographed her mother's belongings after her death, and whose work is shortly going on show at Michael Hoppen).

Image © Michael Walter (www.michaelwalter.co.uk)

What started as a simple collection of images for the Perpignan Festival by members of the Luna collective has become an ongoing, online magazine, showcasing the works of creative photographers such as Bruno Stevens, Olivier Culmann and even Martin Parr.

Lunatic is Karl Blanchet's brainchild, born of his discontent with classic photojournalism. The project is an example of 'creative contemporary photojournalism. The idea behind Lunatic is that there are interesting photojournalists who can write with their cameras,' he says. 'They are able to make you think, to make you feel with their photos.'

Ghana Night © Karl Blanchet/Luna (www.karlblanchet.com)

Encouraged by the success of the second issue (more than 20,000 readers from 60 different countries), Lunatic, which is co-managed by Eric Hilaire, picture editor for The Guardian, has now published its third issue.

It presents an original selection of Martin Parr's images that convey a recurrent theme, that of 'photographing photographers photographed'. A typically 'Parresque' subject that reminds us that photography is both social practice and practised reflex,' Blanchet says.

There are also seven other photography projects by Markus Lokai, Lihee Avidan, GMB Akash, Carolyn Drake, Michael Walter, Gregoire Bernadi and Blanchet.

Check them out at www.lunaticmag.com.

Photographers beware? Monthly magazine 'The Digital Journalist' departed from its normal photojournalist position this month, instead dedicating its content solely to the growing field of video journalism.

Ken Kobré who runs his own site 'The KobreGuide.com', takes over as editor for the issue, in which the “Webs best video journalism” is displayed, which is increasingly relevant to professional photographers with the introduction of video capabilities on cameras such as the Canon 5D Mark II. Many column inches are given, promoting the use of Video as a journalistic format on the web.

The Digital Journalist describes how many news organisations were originally reluctant to embrace the technology, but established new sites such as The New York Times have led the way recently; even picking up a 'Peabody award', the first for a web outlet. The work of Colin Mulvany is chosen as the cover story, a photographer who reinvented himself as a multimedia journalist, who explains: “As the newspaper industry melted down and retrenched, I became uncertain as to what my future held.” How many times has that been said. Though a move that has worked for him it seems, judge for yourself here; and to show that his photographic skills are still sharp, here.

A good read is an intriguing interview with award-winning Reuters photographer Lucy Nicholson, who is another example of turning pictures turning into moving pictures.

The photography-to-video relationship is apparent in this video, describing how an iconic photograph of a soldier in the Iraq war has affected the lives of both the soldier and photographer.

Picture © Rinko Kawauchi

Rinko Kawauchi, the celebrated young Japanese photographer whose books have taken the art world by storm, will be in London next month to deliver a one-off workshop.

Celebrated for her almost childlike view of the world – expressed in loose, free-flowing edits of her simply composed pictures and published in photobooks such as Utatane (2002), Aila (2004) and Cui Cui (2005) – she will run a five-day workshop, organised by award-winning photographer Leonie Purchas.

‘My husband and I participated on an Antione d’Agata workshop organised by the Arles photo festival in France,’ says Purchas. ‘It provoked me to question my practice in an intense and accelerated way, and my work developed more rapidly than it had done through years of studying.

‘It’s a form of learning that I find exciting and feel is missing here in the UK. I now live in a large studio that was originally a fabric workshop. It seems the perfect, and most affordable place, to host our first treat, Rinko Kawauchi, who will be followed up in November by JH Engstrom.

‘The workshop is open to people for whom photography is their life, but not necessarily their profession. It is being organised by myself, Lina Brocchieri and Camilla Gore - two friends mad enough to believe in a not- for-profit dream…’
The event runs five days, from 01-05 June, in Stoke Newington, and costs £480. There are spaces for 10 people, with three currently still available.

Purchas is also organising a talk in which Kawauchi will be in conversation with Martin Parr at nearby Campbell Works. The event on the evening of 01 June costs £5, and spaces are limited. Email photo.workshops@yahoo.co.uk to book a place or to apply for the workshop.
For news on further events, visit here (which wasn’t live yet as we posted, but is due to be so soon).

Parr introduced Kawauchi to the British public when he guest edited BJP in 2004. He also wrote a piece on her, which is republished below:

Photography is a curious beast. Just when you think every permutation has been tried and that all new work looks like something we have seen before, along comes a photographer who can make us look and say: 'That's so simple, why hasn't any one thought of this before?'

Often critics dismiss this work as banal or just plain bad because, as with listening to new music, it takes a while to appreciate it. Memorable examples of this are Robert Frank's The Americans, 1959 and more recently William Eggleston's Guide, published and exhibited originally in 1976 to damming reviews from the critics. Nearly 25 years later Eggleston's work is correctly hailed as being a milestone in colour photography and he is praised the world over.

The young Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi is another candidate for this role as her work is so distinctive. No other photographer takes images like hers and it is even difficult to work out her lineage and influences, as one can often do when viewing contemporary work.

I was so convinced about the importance of Kawauchi's work that I curated not just one but two shows of her work for the Arles festival this summer, where I was guest artistic director.

Although they were her first major shows outside Japan, she has gathered a strong following at home over the last few years.

Her first book Utatane was originally published in 2001 but is already in its seventh edition. Over 20,000 copies have been sold - though bear in mind that the Japanese are the biggest photography book-buying public in the world. Utatane and the follow up book Hanabi won the coveted Ihei Kimura prize for new photography.

So what is her subject matter and why are so many people excited by her work? Well the simple answer is that it concerns the pleasures and terrors of everyday life. She has a knack for photographing the simplest object, animal or person, revealing both a feeling of beauty and a sinister undertone.

I talked to Kawauchi in Arles and we discussed her work and career. Her start in photography was pretty conventional, picking up a camera for the first time on a school trip and finding herself drawn to the medium.

But it took her a time to realise she was a photographer not a cameraman - Kawauchi's rather charming definition of boring or commercial photographers (to put it bluntly).

When I asked how many photographers she thought there were in Japan, she hesitated and said 'a few'. But, surprisingly, Kawauchi also does quite a lot of commercial work, including a whole book to accompany a film. As she says: 'It's the final use of the image that counts, not the reason it was taken.'

Her work is distinctively Japanese, so I asked her if she liked to shoot outside Japan. 'Absolutely,' she replied. 'My subject matter is spiritual, not factual so I can photograph anywhere.'

For me the most compelling aspect of her work is the everyday terror she finds, and I ask if she is frightened by the world. She says she is, but adds: 'I have a switch in my head that I can turn on when I am working and this is how I can locate these feelings. When I am not working I turn it off.'

She believes that we all experience these feelings when we are children, and are first questioning the meaning of existence. She also believes that these feelings are latent in everybody, and that she almost has a responsibility to show these qualities to other people through her work.

At Arles I exhibited her most recent show and book Alia, as well as her first body of work. Alia roughly translates into English as 'birth', a subject that has interested Kawauchi for many years. For the project she photographed both animal and human births, using the internet to make contact with a small group of midwives who put her in touch with some expectant mothers. She won their confidence, and arranged to photograph the upcoming births.

Kawauchi says that birth contains a fascination for her, adding: 'It is something you don't see when you walk down the street, and I wanted to see it and photograph it.'

Asked if she wants a baby herself, she replies: 'Of course, doesn't everybody?'

In Arles the installation for Aila was very distinctive, a scatter of small full bled, frameless images on the wall, while the Utatane exhibition showed larger images placed mainly in a row. Kawauchi insisted on installing this exhibition herself, aided by her agent and book publisher.

But she is humble about her success, only stating that she must be a real 'photographer' now because so many people are interested in her work.

Kawauchi has a refreshing and disturbing innocence and I believe that we will hear her name much more frequently in the years to come.

Dan Chung, who's living and working in China on an increasingly long-term basis, just called. He's shot an HD video campaign for Oxfam on the Canon 5D Mkii, the first HD video the charity has commissioned. Publicising the effects of climate change on three women's lives, it's moving stuff in more ways than one. Click here to see Sufia's story.

'Climate change is a really important issue for Oxfam this year, so we wanted to do something a bit different, with the ultimate aim of producing innovative content for our website,' says Oxfam's multimedia content editor Ben Beaumont. 'Everyone here is delighted with the results - the quality and depth of using a digital stills camera to do video really shines through. You need that look to make people stop and watch a film for two minutes, and to make them really feel what life is like for this community. People have told us they haven't seen anything like this from an NGO before.'

For more information, check out Oxfam's site. Oxfam has also posted the videos on YouTube.

Upper Egypt, Great Temple of Dendera, general view, 1852. Maxime Du Camp (1822-1894), courtesy of the National Media Museum.

Don McCullin has curated his pick of the National Media Museum's photography collection, for a freely-accessible online flickr gallery. You can also access images showing McCullin at work making the selection.

The photographer is best-known for his reportage but his next book features archaelogical sites around Egypt, and his selection of images reflects that. McCullin's own work is currently on show at the NMM - Don McCullin: In England reflects Britain from the 1950s to the present day, and is open until 27 September.

If you’re a collector looking for a hard-to-find photography book, it may be worth stopping by Angela Hill’s Pop-Up Bookstore on St Martin’s Lane. Conveniently located in the centre of London, the temporary store is a stone’s throw from Trafalgar Square.

Inside you will find an eclectic selection of Hill’s favourite books on art, fashion and photography. Though quite pricey, it is certainly worth having a look as you may find a real gem hidden amongst the stacks, especially as stock is refreshed every day.

When asked if the move from the usual Dover St Market location was worth it, Hill said ‘you can do slightly different things here. You also get an amazing variety of people. There’s been a bizarre mix of photographers, rock stars and people into fashion coming here. Agyness Deyn popped in to buy a punk book, we’ve had the whole of Motley Crue in here and the whole of Black Eyed Peas.’

Hill, who is a photographer herself, has been collecting books from a young age, ‘I used to spend my pocket money on Vogue when I was growing up,’ she said, ‘though I doubt my parents were very happy about that.’ If you have some spare time in the capital, it’s certainly worth a look. Open seven days a week from 11am to 10pm Tuesday to Saturday and 11am to 6pm Sunday to Monday, the store will stay in its current location until 29 August.

Julius Shulman, giant of 20th century architectural photography, has died aged 98.

The photographer’s work became synonymous with the laid-back glamour of the West Coast style, summing up the luxurious minimalism of mid-century Modernism. He completed more than 8000 architectural commissions in his 60-year career, including photographing key buildings for leading American-based architects of the 20th Century, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies Van de Rohe, Pierre Koenig, Richard Neutra and Oscar Niemeyer.

Perhaps his most enduring photographs, shot free-of-charge, are of the Case Study House Program (1945-62), which aimed to demonstrate the principles of Modernism and their sustainability for low cost housing. And if one photograph has become his signature image, it is Pierre Koenig's Case Study house #22, 1960 (also known as the Stahl Residence), which is said to be the world's most published architectural image. Featuring only a detail from the building, with two women chatting in a corner, seated overlooking downtown LA in dramatic backdrop, it is a perfect example of his combination of instinct and preparation.
He had asked two friends of his assistant to be at hand, if needed, to make the house appear inhabited. 'At one point in the early evening I was setting up inside,’ he told BJP’s Simon Bainbridge in an interview published in December 2007. ‘I walked outside, and the two girls just happened to be sitting in that corner of the house. I brought my camera outside and immediately set up the composition.'
He opened up the camera lens for several minutes - judging the exposure without a light meter - to let in the scene below. 'At a certain moment I called to the girls. "Sit up" and then to my assistant, "Turn on the ceiling lights"' - firing the flashbulbs mounted behind his camera and capturing the whole scene in one shot.'
Benedict Taschen, the publisher of many of his recent books, dubbed him 'One Shot Schulman' for this uncanny ability to judge the light and composition perfectly and get his shot first time. 'The secret to the success of my photography is to always create a proper balance of light,' he wrote the photographer in the introduction to his classic 1962 textbook, Photographing Architecture and Interiors. 'Put your camera down. Don't act like a photographer; instead, act like a human being reviewing a piece of sculpture and understand where you would like the light to be for your exposure.'

Shulman, who had been ill for some time, died at home in Los Angeles on 15 July.

Rhubarb-Rhubarb is scrapping its 2010 international portfolio review, after a decade of successful events.

Rhonda Wilson, Rhubarb-Rhubarb’s creative director, announced the plan at this year’s review, citing financial constraints resulting from the recession.

‘It's been a tremendous year for us, with the winning of the Obama's People exhibition and around 400,000 people visiting the Rhubarb exhibitions this year between April and August,’ said Wilson. ‘But the reality is that while photographers want to know more, their capacity to buy time at reviews and courses is getting less, due to the current financial uncertainty and cutbacks in commissions and editorial.

‘At the same time, flights and hotel rooms for reviewers are going up. The response from other portfolio review directors is to put up the prices to the artist but we bought ours down a little this year – we don't just want to entice only artists who are cash-rich, that’s not what we're about. We want to bring prices down more but we lost three regular sponsors this year in the downturn, so we ended up supporting the review costs with other projects we took on. That isn't how we want to move forward.

Instead the organisation hopes to run an international summer school next year and resume the review in 2011, plus move into a new space in Birmingham and open public photobook library. To find out more read our breaking news story.

Gamma owner says there's no future in news photography after the agency leaked €3m in six months

A photography lecturer faces a disciplinary hearing after it was alleged that he showed students pornographic material.

BJP understands that Simon Burgess, who lectures at East Surrey College in Redhill, will appear in front of the hearing on 17 August after a complaint was lodged by one or a number of second-year students on the Higher National Diploma in Digital Photography.

The complaint concerns photographs by Del LaGrace Volcano, whose work has often been deemed controversial, but has nonetheless been exhibited in galleries across Europe, including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

More...

That Jonnie Craig's a bright young thing. Born in 1988, he's already publishing images in Vice magazine, published a monograph, had a solo show at Claire De Rouen books (among others) and shot ads for Nike, Diesel and Levis (among others). Apparently that's not quite enough though because there's also talk of his own gallery space and he's just launched a magazine.

Huh. Magazine , as it's known, is a Vice-like mix of the spurious and serious, including features on hipster favourites music, art and skateboarding. It also features some interesting photography - I particularly liked the shots by Jerry Hsu, Matthew Genitempo and Karly Wildenhaus.

Wildenhaus was also born in just 1988, but her interesting, deliberately-pixellated work suggests she too is wise beyond her years. 'Identifying what qualifies as a photograph has been relatively straightforward for the past 100 years, but that definition is coming into question as more computer-generated images deal with photographic issues,' she says. 'Despite a lot of anxiety over the death of film, I definitely don't see any traditional or trend-oriented forms of photography dying out. Instead, the boundaries of the medium will become less distinguishable. That's all I could really predict at this point.'

Girl in a Golden Dress, Georgia, 2009 © Vanessa Winship. From the series Georgia for a Song

Vanessa Winship won the Godfrey Argent prize for black-and-white photography in the 2008 National Portrait Gallery Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize but this year she's in the running for the main award.

Winship is one of four photographers shortlisted for the £12,000 prize, which is announced on 03 November. Also in the running are British photographer Paul Floyd Blake, Israeli-born Michal Chelbin and Serb-born, Canadian-based Mirjana Vrbaski. The first prize winner picks up £12,000, second prize £3000, third prize £2000 and fourth prize £1000. The Godfrey Argent Award-winner receives £2500, and this year this award will be given to the best photographer under 25.

Winship took her shot on one of many recent trips to Georgia, where she is trying to build a contemporary photographic portrait of the region. 'I found this particular young girl in the capital, Tbilisi, at one of the Palaces of Marriage,' she says. 'She was there as a guest at one of the many weddings that took place on that summer's day. I particularly liked the delicacy of her features and the way she held herself in what looked like a new and best outfit.'

Diane Smyth, deputy editor, was one of the judges of this year's NPG Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, alongside Sandy Nairne, director of the NPG; Terence Pepper, the NPG's curator of photographs; Sian Bonnell, artist and curator; Fergus Greer, photographer; and Stephen Snoddy, director of the New Walsall Art Gallery. The exhibition goes on show at the National Portrait Gallery, London from 05 November to 14 February 2010, after which it goes on tour around the UK.

If you were wowed by the full production quality of Vincent Laforet's film Reverie, shot on a Canon EOS 5D MkII, take a look at what Bill Frakes achieved with a Nikon D3s:

Shot on assignment for Nikon in Australia, and presented at the European launch of the D3s in St Andrews, it tells you much more about how photographers will be using DSLR cameras to capture video alongside stills in the near future. Reverie shows just what these cameras (and an army of assistants) are capable of, but it's a movie. Frakes' film tells me much more about how shooters can combine stills and motion to create really effective multimedia presentations that add more of a story element to their published pictures, and how online can work with and enhance the printed story.

Frakes, who shoots for Sports Illustrated, told us that as many as eight million readers see his pictures in the magazine, but his multimedia stories garner as many as 50 million hits, which drive visitors back to the magazine. (And who says multimedia doesn't pay?)

Frakes has used the D3s in extreme low light conditions in the film, but what's really interesting for me is that as they're combined together, the stills jump out from the video footage, proving that photographs still hold their arresting power in this environment.

There are, of course, many other examples of the effective use of stills and motion (Media Storm is a pretty good place to start your search), so let us know what's impressed you.