GEORGETOWN, Ohio – The Georgetown public library is holding a photo contest for the Holiday’s called the Christmas Photography Contest for amateurs.

The contest have been taking place for a number of years now even though it is not annual it is still not the first time that the library is holding it.

Georgetown library youth services associate Adeline stated that “I think we have had it in the past but it hasn’t really been yearly maybe we will see how this one goes and that is definitely a possibility I would say” when discussing if the contest is annual.

This event is open to all ages and anyone who has photos that are in the theme of Christmas can submit them to the library.

The official website for the library states that “To enter submit a 5×7 copy of your favorite Christmas photo (stockings hung with care, children in their Christmas wear, Christmas lights all aglow, presents tied in a bow) mounted on card stock, with your name, age, and phone number on the back.”

There will be three different age group categories for the contest with the first one ages seven through eleven, the second one ages twelve through sixteen and the third one ages seventeen and up.

When asked if there is usually quite a few submissions for the contest Adeline states “Yes typically” and that the library hopes to have around “Hopefully around 25 to 30 maybe.”

This contest was introduced at the library before this year but Adeline stated how it came about to have it by stating “We were just kind of thinking of different things that we haven’t done in a while like I said we have kind of brought this idea back but just getting together and talking it through with everybody that works here and the staff and trying to come up with some different ideas that the crowd would like.”

Contests’ and events that take place at locations like libraries connect with the communities and Holiday themed ones do so even more.

“We are hoping that it can encourage creativity and also it gives people a change especially the amateurs a chance to share their passion for photography and kind of show others their work that they may not have a platform to share that on” Adeline states.

As long as the photos are Christmas related they can be submitted to the contest that started on Nov. 20 and runs through Dec. 11.

For more information you can visit the event page for the library at https://www.browncountypubliclibrary.org/content/christmas-photography-contest-georgetown-library or check out the official Facebook page for the Brown County Public Library at https://www.facebook.com/people/Brown-County-Public-Library/100070182910577/.

A stunning photograph of a Turkish buffalo shepherd rearing back on his horse wins top prize at ViewSonic’s 4th ColorPro Awards. 

The ViewSonic ColorPro Awards is an annual competition for photography and video, that showcases enormous talent across the two mediums. ViewSonic has announced the top 10 winners of the 4th ColorPro Awards titled Rise, which was also the theme prompt for the competition. The prize pool for the competition includes both cash prizes and some of ViewSonic’s best products. ViewSonic is a manufacturer of some of the best monitors and features highly in our guide to the best monitors for video editing. 

The top honors in the photography category went to Turkish photographer Meriç Aktar for his image titled The Return of the Buffalo Shepherd. The shot was taken of a buffalo shepherd in Dokuzpınar Village of Kayseri province, Turkey, and depicts the start of the day’s journey of adventuring over dusty landscapes with his herd of around 500 buffalos. The image shows the shepherd on horseback, rising up through the sun-filled cloud of dust, surrounded by his buffalos and dog companion.   

Second place in the photography category went to Jonas Hafner of Germany for his image Rise. The photograph portrays a woman lying in a field of plants, acting as a visual representation of transformation. Hafner says, “Like plants, we humans also undergo a transformation over time and grow through our challenges and experiences.”

Svetlin Yosifov from Bulgaria won third place, with a touching portrait titled Caro Boy. The photograph shows a small boy from the Karo Tribe who lives in the Omo Valley in Ethiopia. The community survives on agriculture and the rising levels and annual flooding of the Omo River. The stunning black-and-white image portrays a tender moment of a boy with his cattle.  

In addition to the photography category the newly introduced video category also presented some exceptional work from creatives all around the globe. First place in this category was awarded to British photographer and videographer Lucy Galliford for her film Rise. Galliford says, “My film is a visual expression of my passion – I stripped my soul of the ‘why’ and poured it into this. I didn’t have the budget to go to any extravagant locations; I just wanted to stick to my roots and tell my story to the world, showcasing how I rise to the challenge of fulfilling my dreams”.

Second place was awarded to Maor Benezri from Israel, whose film centers around memories and experiences made whilst visiting Jordan, and how those things we cannot touch can often provide us with more value. The film is titled Jordan – Collect Memories, Not Things. 

“Through the ColorPro Awards, we have fostered a global community where creators can connect and achieve visual excellence in their artistic expression. This year’s winners have brilliantly captured the theme of ‘RISE,’ bringing forth diverse stories of personal growth and resilience from around the world,” said Oscar Lin, General Manager of the Monitor Business Unit at ViewSonic

This year’s submissions showcased an extreme amount of talent, from hundreds of entrants. The finalists’s work has been put on exhibition in London, and will also be displayed in Vietnam and Taiwan. For a full list of finalists and for more information on the work and the ongoing exhibition, visit the awards website.

For more information on monitors see our guides on the best monitors for photo editing, the best ultra-wide monitor for photo editing, and the best monitors for MacBook Pro. 

This year’s Rotary Photography Contest winner is thrilled to have been in the right place at the right time to capture this beautiful picture of a Bighorn Mountain Sheep. His winning photograph will appear on the 2024 Friendship Card, and he will receive two Friendship Cards to use when in town.

Steven Rishel and his wife live most of the year in Eastern Nebraska, but their love of Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park draws them to Colorado for the month of February, where they love to hike and explore the park when the temperatures are low, and the visitors are few.

On a windy day last February, they left the Alluvial Fan parking lot to walk to Endovalley. Steve fell behind his wife as he stopped to take pictures along the way.

He rounded a curve to see his wife waving at him to come quick. There on the side of the road were two rams majestically standing in the sun. While he rushed to prepare his camera, the rams waited patiently without moving away. Steve was able to zoom in on them and captured seven or eight photos before they sauntered away.

Steve described it as the shot of a lifetime. The ram was looking directly at him, and most importantly its eyes were in focus.

They never saw Bighorns through the rest of their month-long visit.

Even before winning this contest, Steve and his wife were Friendship Card holders. Introduced to the card by the Country Market cashiers, they consider it to be a valuable shopping tool whenever they are in Estes Park. They look forward to receiving their complimentary cards for their upcoming return visit to Estes Park next February.

Watch for the announcement as Friendship cards for 2024 will go on sale the second week of December. They make great stocking stuffers.

Lee Miller’s big break began with a near-death experience. Miller was discovered at 19 by publishing scion Condé Nast himself when he pulled her out of the way of an oncoming car in Manhattan—then put her on the cover of Vogue. But Miller, born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1907, was not content to be a muse for male photographers.

Instead, she moved to Paris, where she stepped behind the lens and studied with Surrealist photographer Man Ray, her mentor and lover. Miller mastered the technical aspects of photography quickly and distinguished herself among the few high-profile women photographers of the day by opening her own studio in the City of Light. There she took portraits of royalty, literary elites and even the pet lizard of a French socialite, who paid $100 for the image. Soon, Miller turned to photojournalism, ultimately producing some of the 20th century’s most groundbreaking images for the magazine whose cover she once graced.

During World War II, ignoring personal warnings from U.S. diplomats to return stateside, Miller embedded with the U.S. military. She chronicled the war across Europe, capturing unforgettable images: Londoners huddled in underground stations during the Blitz; bloodied patients at an Allied field hospital in Normandy. Miller pushed the bounds at Vogue: At a time when the 1940 bombing of Vogue’s London office didn’t merit a mention in its own pages, Miller ensured that her images went to press: She was among the first reporters to enter Dachau after its liberation and sent a message with her photos to her editor, “I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE.”

After the war, she settled on a Sussex farm, where artists like Pablo Picasso and Jean Dubuffet were regular visitors. Yet Miller struggled to find a sense of purpose and was largely forgotten until a trove of her photographs was rediscovered in her attic, several years after her death in 1977.

Now a feature film is helping rescue Miller from obscurity: In Lee, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2023, Kate Winslet (center) is magnetic in the title role, and was so inspired by Miller’s story that she wrote the foreword to Lee Miller: Photographs, a book by Miller’s son released this past October.

Gift

A new exhibition and catalogue reveal the social documentary of the overlooked photographer, who chronicled the working lives of women

November 28, 2023

LINCOLN — Joel Sartore’s ambitious project to photograph the approximately 20,000 endangered species on the planet hit a milestone recently with images of a sunflower-seed-sized beetle in south Florida.

The Miami tiger beetle — a relative of Nebraska’s Salt Creek tiger beetle — was the 15,000th species threatened with extinction photographed by the Lincoln-based, National Geographic photographer.

Sartore’s “Photo Ark” project, begun in 2006 in Nebraska, has a goal of photographing species before they disappear.

The project was recently honored with placement on a U.S. Postal Service stamp.

A conservationist who works with the iridescent green-and-gold colored beetle called it an “honor” that the Miami beetle was the landmark, 15,000th species photographed.

“It is too often that the small, less classically charismatic species are overlooked in mainstream conservation efforts,” said George Gann, founder/executive director of The Institute for Regional Conservation in Delray Beach, Florida, and chair emeritus for the Society for Ecological Restoration.

Sartore has said that his goal in the Photo Ark project is to inspire people to preserve and protect species that are on the decline.

“When people look through my lens, I want them to gain an appreciation for how interesting each species is, how worthy of protection they are, and how important each one is to keeping our planet healthy,” Sartore said in a press release Monday.

That goes for even a species as small as the Miami tiger beetle, he said. It is one of 2,600 species of beetles and is found only in the pine rocklands of southern Florida. The endangered Salt Creek tiger beetle is found only in saline marshes near Lincoln.

“When we take action to protect wildlife, we are safeguarding our own future too, and there is no better time to act than right now,” Sartore said.

The announcement of the 15,000th Photo Ark image on Monday comes as the National Geographic Society holds a monthlong celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act. It was also a prelude to Giving Tuesday, a day of philanthropy for nonprofits such as the National Geographic Society.

Nov 28 (Reuters) – This year is one that will go down in history as being marked by two big wars – an ongoing conflict in Ukraine as it fights off a Russian invasion and a fresh outbreak of violence in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas militants.

Reuters photographers were on the ground to capture it all as it unfolded – and much more.

In February, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Turkey and Syria brought buildings down on their residents – including Abdulalim Muaini, who was eventually rescued, and his family, who were among the more than 54,000 people who lost their lives in the disaster. Another quake in September killed more than 2,900 people in Morocco.

It was a year when evidence that the Earth’s climate was changing seemed starker than ever. Wildfires in southern Europe and Canada in July destroyed homes and blanketed cities in a thick haze, while in Latin America water levels dropped, threatening livelihoods and leaving Amazon River dolphins high and dry. Storms brought heavy rains to California in March, almost completely swallowing one road – a sight best illustrated from the sky.

Fighting between armed groups and attacks on civilians intensified in eastern Congo, there was a new spate of ethnically driven killings in Darfur, Sudan, and gangs took over much of Haiti.

Such desperate situations led many to embark on risky migration journeys in hopes of a better life. Venezuelans balanced on top of freight trains to get to the U.S.-Mexican border while Africans set out for Europe in rickety boats. Not all of them made it.

Trials occupied the U.S. headlines – Donald Trump, the former president, became embroiled in a series of legal troubles, while cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted of fraud.

The big story of late 2023 was the Israel-Hamas war. On Oct. 7, Hamas rampaged through southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking about 240 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. In retaliation, Israel bombarded Gaza and mounted a ground offensive, which by late November had killed over 15,000 people, according to Gaza authorities. Many of those caught up in the violence were children and youngsters.

While this war and other stories took the spotlight off Ukraine, the conflict raged on in the country’s east. Death became an everyday occurrence – one Reuters photographer captured a woman in October looking at bodies laid out on the ground in a way that suggests it was sad but no longer shocking to her.

Amid the death and despair that marked 2023, humans still found ways to remember and to celebrate – and Reuters photographers looked for those stories, too. Children took part in traditions passed down from their elders – learning ancient crafts, dressing up for religious occasions, or waving flags at the May coronation of King Charles III.

People played sports, they went out to party and to see art exhibitions, they swam and they surfed, they strutted catwalks and they gave out Oscars.

UFOs became an unexpectedly hot news topic, as hearings took place in the United States and Mexico – and something appeared in the skies over the U.S. in February. Was it a bird? Was it a plane? Was it ET? Or was it a spy balloon?

A Reuters photographer took a picture of an object drifting down to the coast in South Carolina after it was shot down, just one moment among many that made up the world in 2023.

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Introduction

Ease of Use

The Samyang AF 35-150mm F2-2.8 FE is a rather large and heavy lens, which is not that surprising given the combination of the fast, constant f/2-2.8 maximum aperture and wide zoom range.

It measures almost 16cms in length and weighs in at well over 1kg – 1,231g / 43.4oz, making it slightly heavier than the Tamron 35-150mm equivalent (1,165g (2.57 lbs.).

If you consider that it could effectively replace both a 28-70mm and 70-200mm lens in a typical event photography setup, however, it’s actually substantially lighter, just so long as you don’t mind the reduction in zoom range at either end.

While you can use it on a smaller Sony APS-C sensor camera body, it won’t balance particularly well and the equivalent focal length will also change to 52-225mm.

As demonstrated by the product images, it’s a better match for a full-frame camera like the Sony ZV-E1 that we tested it with, where it just feels better balanced and more “at home”.

Build quality is excellent, despite Samyang traditionally offering lenses at the cheaper end of the market. The Samyang AF 35-150mm F2-2.8 FE feels very solid in your hand, with the outer barrel being made from metal rather than high-grade plastics, which probably accounts for its extra weight.

The zoom ring is wide enough, offers a smooth action and has a tactile ridged, rubberised grip band. The lens extends by about an extra 3cm when fully zoomed out to 150mm.

The AF 35-150mm F2-2.8 FE features a Zoom Lock switch which fixes the lens at its 35mm setting and prevents it from extending when it’s pointed downwards, although we didn’t really notice too much zoom creep in normal use.

There are two focus control buttons, a feature that is found on many other Samyang zooms. It saves the focus at any desired position and naturally changes focus between two subjects.

The optional Lens Station accessory allows you to update and customise the lens directly, rather than via a camera body.

In the customisation options, the direction and speed of focus can be changed and the focus ring can be used for aperture instead of manual focusing,

For video, the focus hold buttons can be customised for preset focus points 1 and 2 for video so that you can pull focus from one to the other at a designated speed.

If you set the MF position to Mode 3, the focus ring and zoom ring are linked together so that you can take a dolly shot simply by operate the zoom ring.

The focusing ring is located towards the end of the lens mount, making it slightly unintuitive and harder to locate in a rush.

The Samyang AF 35-150mm F2-2.8 FE features the latest Linear Stepping Motor focus mechanism which allows for virtually silent auto-focusing, making it well-suited to video.

In use, we found the focusing system to be very quiet and also very fast with the lens mounted on a Sony ZV-E1 camera.

The autofocus can be over-ridden simply by rotating the lens focus ring while the shutter-release button is pressed halfway.

Focusing is fully internal but zooming is not, with the length of the lens changing as you zoom from 35mm to 150mm.

The Samyang AF 35-150mm F2-2.8 FE isn’t fully weather-proof but it does benefit from a moisture-resistant construction with 11 internal seal points and a rubber gasket around the mount.

This helps to prevent moisture from penetrating the lens, although we’d hesitate to use it in the rain for a prolonged period of time.

The front element has a hydrophobic UMC Coating that is highly resistant to fingerprints and debris.

The lens is supplied with plastic lens caps and a plastic flower-shaped lens hood – there’s no lens bag included. The filter size is 82mm.

Note that this lens is not compatible with Samyang’s range of teleconverters. Also there is no official tripod collar/mount available for it, although a third-party one may well be released in the future.

Focal Range

At the 35mm focal length the angle of view is 63°26′ degrees.

35mm

At the 150mm focal length the angle of view is 16°25′ degrees.

150mm

Chromatic Aberrations

Chromatic aberrations, typically seen as purple or blue fringes along contrasty edges, are well controlled with this lens.

35mm

150mm

Vignetting

With the Samyang AF 35-150mm F2-2.8 FE wide open at f/2-2.8, you can see some noticeable light fall-off in the corners. Stopping down helps, although to completely get rid of this phenomenon, you will need to use an f-stop of f/5.6 or smaller.

35mm

150mm

Distortion

Barrel distortion is well controlled, but there’s some pin-cushion distortion evident at 150mm in both the JPEG and RAW files which you’ll need to correct in post-processing until a suitable lens profile is released for your editing software.

35mm

150mm

Sunstars and Flare

The Samyang AF 35-150mm F2-2.8 FE produces quite nice sunstars when stopped-down to f/16-f/22, as shown below, although it it a little prone to flare when shooting directly into the sun.

35mm

150mm

Macro

The Samyang AF 35-150mm F2-2.8 FE isn’t claimed to be a macro lens, but it delivers pretty good performance nonetheless if you zoom to 150mm.

The close-focus point is an impressive 33cm from the film/sensor plane at the 35mm focal length (85cm at 150mm) and it has a maximum magnification ratio of 1:5.7 at the 35mm focal length (1:5.5 at 150mm).

Bokeh

Bokeh is a word used for the out-of-focus areas of a photograph, and is usually described in qualitative terms, such as smooth / creamy / harsh etc.

One of the reasons to buy such a fast lens as the Samyang AF 35-150mm F2-2.8 FE is to be able to isolate the subject from the background.

Samyang was apparently very much aware of this requirement, as they employed an iris diaphragm with 9 rounded blades for a pleasing rendering of the out-of-focus highlights. Based on what we have seen, we can say that they largely succeeded.

Below you’ll find some examples, but you are also encouraged to check out our sample images.

Sharpness

In order to show you how sharp the Samyang AF 35-150mm F2-2.8 FE lens is, we are providing 100% crops on the following pages.