Bill Hatcher Photography

Devonport Art Award

The winner of the Devonport Award in Australia was just announced and you can read more (here). The winner is photographer and friend Matt Newton from Hobart, Tasmania. 

There is about a 99% chance you have not heard of this art award, there are so many art awards out there, but in this award the winner recives a $15,000 check and the Devonport Gallery places the art work in their permanent collection. The cool thing about Matt is he is a photo journalist and not an art photographer. His winning photo Moonbird Boy is part of a documentry photo series. Matt talks about the photo in his blog (here) and says, "It seems pretty amazing to see a documentary photo win an Art prize - who says photography is dead !" Matt was also a finalist in this years Moran photographic Award. 

Getting published in National Geographic

One way is by entering the National Geographic photo competition. The deadline is 30 Nov.2010. Click on the image below and it will take you to the National Geographic web site with the entry details. 

Of course the more typical way is through hard work, pursuing great stories and always working toward getting your work published, exhibited and talked about. Entering photo competitions with top magazines like National Geographic, Smithsonian and PDN can be part of this formula. 

Dean Sewell wins 2010 Moran Contemporary Photographic prize

 

Winners of the Doug Moran National Portrait prize and the Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize were awarded last night in Sydney. The former is the prizes painting category.  The Moran prize awards $80,000 to the wining photographer and $150,000 to the wining painter. This makes the Moran prize by far the wealthiest photography prize in Australia.

You can click on Dean Sewell's winning photo image above to view all 45 Moran finalist.

Yahoo news reports,  "For the second consecutive year, Sydney photographer Dean Sewell was awarded first prize in the Open section of the Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize for his work titled Cockatoo Is. Ferry. He wins $80,000 for the black-and-white work, out of 45 photographs that made the final judging.All the works are on display in the Moran Prizes exhibition at the State Library of NSW until September 5. Entry is free."

Dean Sewell is a photojournalist and member of the Australian photography collective Oculi.  

The photography judge for this years comp is the Australian photojournalist Stephen Dupont. You might remember his remarkable video account of his close call with a suicide bomb attack in Afghanistan (here). 

The Great Outdoors Photography Competition Deadline

There's less than a week left to enter this photo competition. Find out more about the comp on their web site here . I rarely enter competitions, but this looks like a nice one. Amateur submissions are judged by National Geographic Traveler and the professional submissions are judged by Photo District News.

 Below are a couple of the images I have submitted for the competition. The tree photo is entered in the outdoor sports and activities category the other is in the scenic category. A curious thing is these two locations have both been dramatically changed, that's a nice way of putting it, by  recent natural disasters.

 

This photo is taken in the Wallaby Creek area outside of Melbourne, Australia. 100% of this forest was destroyed by the bush fires of Black Saturday in February 2009. I am shooting from a rope about 30 feet off the forest floor. I captured this panorama in camera with a Hasselblad Xpan camera on Fuji Velvia film.

In this photo the sun illuminates the moss covered moraine of an outlet glacier on the Myrdalsjokull icecap near Mt. Katla. The recent eruption under the Eyjafjallajokull icecap a neighbor to the Myrdalsjokull has sent up a ash cloud that has effectively buried this landscape in a grey blanket of ash. This photo was made in August 2009 using a Nikon D-700 with a 24-70 2.8 lens.