prize | Martin Bailey Photography

WebSpy and MBP Photography Assignment Prizes!

by Martin Bailey | Jun 1, 2010 | Announcement, Assignment, Competition, Gear

WebSpy, sponsors of the Martin Bailey Photography Podcast, have for a third time kindly set aside funds for us to offer some amazing prizes for the participant with the most accumulated votes after the next six month’s worth of monthly assignments, from June to November 2010. I am also going to throw in a fourth and fifth place prize. Details below…

Basically how it works is that we keep a count of the votes each participant receives from their peers in the MBP community each month, and the three lucky photographers with the most votes when we complete the November 2010 assignment will win one of the following three prizes, according to their placing.

It’s important to note that you don’t have to win every month. You don’t even have to enter every month to win. You just have to come up with enough high quality images over the six months to be awarded a lot of votes from your peers, to get ahead of the rest of the group.

So, here goes, with the prize list for the June to November 2010 MBP/WebSpy Photography Assignment!

Drum roll…..

1st Place Prize: Sony Alpha NEX-5!

This is amazing! Courtesy of WebSpy, we’re bringing you to brand new Sony Alpha NEX-5 Interchangeable Lens Digital Camera with an 18-55mm Lens. You can chose black or silver, it’s your shout.

Sony Alpha NEX-5 Interchangeable Lens Digital Camera

Specification:

Extremely Compact HD Imaging System
14.2 MP APS (1.5x) Exmor CMOS Sensor
Interchangeable 18-55mm E-Series Lens
HD 1080/60i Video / Dolby Digital (AC-3)
Tiltable 3″ 921,600-dot TFT TruBlack LCD
Up to ISO 12800 / Up to 7 fps
Auto HDR capture / DRO Optimizer
In-Camera 226° Sweep Panoramas
Magnesium-alloy Body (8.1 oz)
Memory Stick PRO Duo or SD/SDHC Cards

I’m telling you, I want one of these! I seriously envy the participant that takes this camera away with them.

2nd Place Prize: X-Rite ColorMunki Photo

Every photographer should calibrate their monitor as a bare minimum. Not only does the ColorMunki Photo enable you to do just that, it also enables you to create printer/paper combination profiles to color correct printing, as well as supporting the calibration of projectors. If you also own a ColorChecker Passport, you can actually color correct your entire digital workflow.

X-Rite ColorMunki Photo

Now that’s cool!

3rd Place Prize: X-Rite ColorChecker Passport

The ColorChecker Passport contains a Creative Enhancement Target, a Classic Target and a White Balance target. You start by setting an accurate custom white balance in the field, and then you shoot the Classic Target and Creative Enhancement Targets under the same lighting conditions, to create custom camera profiles in a stand alone desktop application or Adobe Lightroom.

X-Rite ColorChecker Passport

If you incorporate a ColorMunki Photo calibration tool as well, you realize a totally color managed digital workflow. You will be amazed at the difference this makes to your photography.

4th Place Prize: an MBP Fine Art Folio of Your Choice

The fourth place winner will be able to select one of my Fine Art Folios from mbpfolios.com.

Martin Bailey Photography Fine Art Folios

It’s also possible that there’ll be more folios available in six months time.

5th Place Prize: an MBP Fine Art Print of Your Choice

The fifth place winner will be able to select any of my images from my online gallery and I will create a top quality print on Hahnemuhle fine art paper and dispatch it to your door.

The Colours of Japan Folio Prints

Take a look at the images in my Portfolios to get an idea of what you could select.

Thanks WebSpy!

I’m really stoked to be able to bring you these prizes, the first three of which courtesy of our fabulous sponsor, WebSpy. Thanks once again to WebSpy for supporting the MBP Podcast and Blog!

Please do check out WebSpy‘s products, and remember to use the discount code MBPWSY for 10% off anything that you buy.

You can also follow WebSpy on Twitter, to keep up with new product releases.

http://twitter.com/WebSpy

Good luck!

— Martin Bailey

2nd MBP/WebSpy Photography Assignment Prizes!

by Martin Bailey | Dec 15, 2009 | Announcement, Assignment, Competition, Gear, OMG!

WebSpy, sponsors of the Martin Bailey Photography Podcast, have once again kindly set aside funds for us to offer prizes for the next six month’s accumulated votes from each of our monthly assignments. The first assignment, for December 2009 is already in progress, so if you haven’t already started shooting for this, the theme is “Quiet Light”.

For this coming assignment, we are actually going to give away fabulous prizes to the top five, not three, but five participants. We will keep a count of the votes each participant recieves from each month, and the five lucky photographers with the most votes when we complete the June 2010 assignment will win the following prizes.

So, here goes, with the prize list for the Dec ’09 to June ’10 MBP/WebSpy Photography Assignment!

First Prize — A 320GB Sanho HyperDrive COLORSPACE UDMA portable storage unit!

320GB Sanho HyperDrive COLORSPACE UDMA portable storage unit

This new generation of UDMA portable storage units from Sanho are the bees knees. They will download images from up to 14 types of memory cards to the hard disk inside the unit very fast. They verify the data as it is being transfered, and have data recovery tools built into the hardware in case something happens to your images on the memory card. They read RAW files and show you the images on a beautiful 3.2″ LCD screen and will transfer up to 250GB of data with a single charge of the batteries. They also support incremental copy and backup to an external hard drive, which I think is a must.

These units are not only just about the best portable storage device on the market at the moment, they are not restricted by the size of the hard drive that comes with them. As hard drives get larger and cheaper, you can simply buy a new one, and stick it into the HyperDrive COLORSPACE UDMA device, and away you go. These things ROCK!

Note too that as prices drop, if we can buy a larger hard drive model in six month for the same budget that we have now, we will do.

Second Prize — Lensbaby Composer with Case!

Lensbaby Composer

Lensbaby Composer Case

Every, and I mean every photographer should own a Lensbaby Composer! These ingenious little lenses get you thinking about photography in a totally different way. I have owned one for just over six months now, and I simply love it!

The next three lucky winners, from third place to fifth place will each receive X-Rite ColorChecker Passports!

X-Rite ColorChecker Passport

Most of the time, I shoot with my camera set to a White Balance preset like Daylight or Cloudy, but sometimes, you have to take control of white balance, and when you need to do that, the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport is the way to go. The ColorChecker Passport contains a Creative Enhancement Target, a Classic Target and a White Balance target. What’s more, it comes with software to help you create custom camera profiles in a stand alone desktop application and Adobe Lightroom. Not to mention that it comes in a sleek passport sized case for protection and portability.

I’m really stoked to be able to bring you these prizes, with the help of our fabulous sponsor, WebSpy. Thanks once again to WebSpy for supporting the Podcast and Blog!

Good luck!

— Martin Bailey

Podcast 199 : June ’09 Assignment – Everything in Focus – Results

by Martin Bailey | Jul 15, 2009 | Announcement, Assignment, Competition, Podcast

Just a quick post to accompany the 199th Podcast in which we take a look at the three images that received the most votes from their peers in the June 2009 photography assignment, on the theme of Everything in Focus. This was an interesting assignment again, following on from the Nothing in Focus assignment in May.

So, here are the top three images, voted so by your peers:

(Note that this week’s Podcast blog post is not a full transcript. To hear my ad-lib critiques/comments on these images listen to the audio Podcast linked at the bottom of this post or check out the Enhanced Podcast in iTunes.)

Third Place:

Edwin C’s “Slam Dunk”

Second Place:

bksecret’s “Next Thunderstorm”

First Place:

Mr Nikon’s “Drought”

All Images © Copyright of contributing members

The June assignment was the start of a series of six monthly assignments until the end of November, and the prizes for this have been made possible by our sponsors WebSpy. There’s a post on my blog with details of the prizes, but to quickly recap, the third place winner will receive every issue of LensWork Extended up until December this year, when the prize winners will be decided. That’s 29 issues of LensWork extended, which is an incredible prize. Thanks to the kind folks at LensWork for arranging such a great prize for us. The second place winner will receive a Lensbaby Composer. Again, this is just amazing, and will open many creative doors for the winner. The first place winner will receive an incredible Sigma 50mm F1.4 EX DG HSM Lens! If the winner already has this lens or simply does not want it, you can exchange it for a $500 B&H gift voucher.

Podcast show-notes:

Here are the details of the photography assignment prizes that WebSpy has kindly sponsored too: https://martinbaileyphotography.com/2009/06/09/competition-prizes/

This episode is sponsored by WebSpy, the Internet Monitoring, Analysis & Reporting Specialists.

The music in this episode is from the PodShow Podsafe Music Network at http://music.podshow.com/

Audio

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Podcast 195 : May ’09 Assignment – Nothing in Focus – Results

by Martin Bailey | Jun 15, 2009 | Assignment, Competition, Podcast

Today we take a look at the winners of the May Assignment with the theme “Nothing in Focus”, and congratulate the winner of the first Accumulated vote Grand Prize of 2009.

Unfortunately, before recording this episode, I didn’t notice that the third and second place had the same number of votes, meaning they were both actually joint second place. Sorry about that Craig!

Joint Second Place:

“A Blurred” by Craig Halp

Joint Second Place:

“I finally found my reading glasses!” by Milt Lyerly

First Place:

“Tibetan Monk creating Long Life Buddha Sand Mandala” by Paul Davis

First Half of 2009 Grand Prize!

Remember that this assignment was the last assignment for the first half of 2009, which we’ll be grouping together for the first accumulate vote prize. The prize for this first half of the year is a cheeky rain-check prize. I’m working on a project to product small fine art print folios, that I’m hoping to make available in the next few months, and the winner of this first accumulated vote assignment will receive edition #1 of that first folio once it’s available.

And now that the votes are in, I am able to congratulate Forrest Tanaka for amassing over 100 votes in the five assignments that make up this first batch of 2009. He always puts so much into the Assignment, and it really shows. Forrest won the Lowepro bag when we were sponsored by Lowepro too. You’re certainly doing everything right Forrest, so please accept my rain-check prize, and I’ll be in touch in the coming months to make sure that your postal address hasn’t changed.

With that, we start a new series of six monthly assignments from the one currently in progress for June, until the end of November, and the prizes for this have been made possible by our sponsors WebSpy. There’s a blog post with details of the prizes, but to quickly recap, the third place winner will receive every issue of LensWork Extended up until December this year, when the prize winners will be decided. That’s 29 issues of LensWork extended, which is an incredible prize. Thanks to the kind folks at LensWork for arranging such a great prize for us. The second place winner will receive a Lensbaby Composer. Again, this is just amazing, and will open many creative doors for the winner. The first place winner will receive an incredible Sigma 50mm F1.4 EX DG HSM Lens! If the winner already has this lens or simply does not want it, you can exchange it for a $500 B&H gift voucher. How cool is that!?

So, if you haven’t already, please do get out and start shooting for the June assignment, on the theme of Everything in Focus.