Call for entries
The 2009 call for entries in the annual SCNPA contest is now open.
Cost to enter is free for SCNPA members.
You can download application forms, contest schedule and instructions here.
Prizes will be handed out for SCNPA Photographer of the year, Best in Show and Clip Contest Photographer of the year. Door prizes will be drawn throughout the judging.
Schedule of events:
8-9 a.m. – Breakfast, coffee and bagels provided.
9-9:30 a.m. – Judging of student and individual categories begins.
Noon – Lunch for judges and staff.
1 p.m. – Still photo and multimedia judging continues, with closed portfolio judging.
5 p.m – Judges panel discussion on the state of the industry and related topics.
6:30 p.m – Awards presentation and viewing of Pictures of the year.
7 p.m. – SCNPA members meeting and elections.
7:30 p.m. – Adjourn and dinner.
If you have any questions about the contest you can email SCNPA president Gerry Melendez at gerrymelendez@gmail.com.
SCNPA Print Auction 2009
Hi Everyone-
We are pulling together a print auction to raise money for the SCNPA so we can increase our coffers and make our treasurer Andy Burris happy.
The money will go toward our annual conference that will be held in Columbia next year.
The auction will be held during the annual South Carolina Press Association Meeting in Myrtle Beach so that editors, reporters and the like can bid on the prints.
Please clear the use of images with your editors and remember who the audience is when selecting the images.
Send the images to me printed 8x10ish and signed, you can add a black border around the image if you like before March 11th. Call or email with questions.
Grace Beahm
Post and Courier
134 Columbus Street
Charleston SC 29464
SCPOY convention schedule change
After speaking with Marc, this will be our schedule for the contest:
Wednesday Feb 4 - 8 p.m. – POY portfolio judging (closed judging)
Thursday Feb 5 - 9.a.m. – category/multimedia judging (open judging) This is the day dedicated for SCNPA so if you plan on attending
just for the South Carolina portion, this is the day to come.
Winners will be announced and posted Thursday afternoon.
Sunday Feb 8 – 1:30 p.m. – Awards ceremony in conjunction with Southern Short Course POY announcement.
Judging our POY contest will be James Gregg, Bill Bangham and Nicole Fruge.
You can see their bios at
http://www.southernshortcourse.com/seminar/faculty.cfm
Denise McGill will also participate in Thursday’s category judging.
There will be a raffle for door prizes on Thursday after the judging is complete
and a raffle in conjunction with Southern Short Course on Sunday.
Sponsors include ThinkTank photo, Lowepro, Nikon, Camera Bits and Bogen.
I apologize for any confusion along the way. But please try to attend. I can’t begin to
tell you how important it is to support each other during these times. We have a great list of sponsors
this year and it should be a successful weekend.
P.S. There will be an print auction over the weekend. Marc asked me if we wanted to participate. If you wish to participate all you have to do
is bring a signed print, 8 X 10 or bigger, with you on Thursday. Let me know if you have any questions (803) 622-8819
Proceeds from the print auction will go to each one of our organizations.
Thanks all,
–
Gerry Melendez
president, SCNPA
SCNPA and Southern Short Course News
Hi all. It’s that time of year again.
As you all know SCNPA is teaming up with the Southern Short Course in News Photography this year. The date is now set, so wanted to send out a quick reminder to mark your calenders and start gathering up your best work. More information about our contest will be forthcoming.
The 60th annual (2009) Southern Short Course in News Photography will he held in Charlotte, NC in conjunction with the North Carolina Press Photographers Association and South Carolina News Photographers Association.
Dates: Feb. 5-8, 2009
Location: Hilton Charlotte Center City
222 East Third Street
Charlotte, NC
Faculty includes: Emcee Michael Williamson of the Washinton Post; Preston Gannaway of the Rocky Mountain News; James Gregg of the Arizona Daily Star; Bill Bangham of the International Missions Board; Ross Taylor of the Hardford Courant; Barbara Marshall of Lamb & Braswell, LLC and Nicole Fruge of the San Antonio Express-News
Special Guest: Gene Furr, SSC Lifetime Achievement winner
NC Faculty: Mark Gormus of the Richmond Times Dispatch and Randy Piland of Elon University.
Hope everyone is having a great holiday season.
Orphan Works 2008
On Friday, September 26, 2008, the United States Senate passed their version of the Orphan Works legislation by hotline. A hotline is an informal term for a request to members of the Senate to agree to allow a bill or resolution to be approved by the Senate without debate or amendment (for more information on hotline process read this article by Sen. Tom Colburn).
Currently the House version of The Orphan Works Act of 2008 bill, H.R. 5889, is in the House Judiciary Committee, and while it is not as damaging as the Senate version S.2913, either version of the bill would cause catastrophic harm to creative communities which depend on protections of their intellectual property, provided under current Copyright law.
According to the Orphan Works Act of 2008, an “orphan work” is defined as any copyrighted work whose author is unable to be located by an infringer who claims they have performed a “reasonably diligent search” (however it in no way gives any parameters as to what a reasonably diligent search is. In a departure from existing copyright law and business practice, the U.S. Copyright Office has proposed that Congress grant such infringers freedom to ignore the rights of the author and use the work for any purpose, including commercial usage.
This proposal goes far beyond current concepts of fair use. It is written so broadly that it will expose new works to infringement, even where the author is alive, in business, and licensing the work. The bill would substantially limit the copyright holder’s ability to recover financially or protect the work, even if the work was registered with the U.S. Copyright Office prior to infringement. The bill also has a disproportionate impact on visual artists such as photographers, because it is common for an artist’s, work to be published without credit lines or because credit lines can be removed electronically removed by others in our current, electronic age, where many of these images wind up on the internet.
The Orphan Works Act would force artists to risk their lives’ work to subsidize the start-up ventures of private, profit making registries, using untested image recognition technology and untried business models. These models would inevitably favor the aggregation of images into corporate databases over the licensing of copyrights by the lone artists who create the art. The most common scenario of orphaning in visual art is the unmarked image. There is only one way to identify the artist belonging to an unmarked image. That would be to match the art against an image-recognition database where the art resides with intact authorship information. These databases would become one-stop shopping centers for infringers to search for royalty-free art. Any images not found in the registries could be considered orphans. There is no limit to the number of these registries nor the prices they would charge artists for the coerced registration of their work.
In the end, the artist would bear the financial burden of paying for digitizing and depositing the digitized copy with the commercial registries. Almost all visual artists such as painters, illustrators and photographers are self employed. The number of works created by the average visual artist far exceeds the volume of the most prolific creators of literary, musical and cinematographic works. The cost and time-consumption to individual artists of registering tens of thousands of visual works, at even a low fee, would be prohibitive; therefore countless working artists would find existing works orphaned from the moment they create them. The Copyright Office has stated explicitly that failure of the artist to meet this burden of registration would result in their work automatically becoming an orphan and subject to legal infringement.
I don’t feel that there are words strong enough to tell you how important it is to personally contact your Representative in the United States House, and ask them to stand against this piece of legislation. However if you don’t have enough time to call or write them personally please visithttp://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/issues/alert/?alertid=11980321 or http://www.petitiononline.com/Stop2913/petition.html or http://www.house.gov/.
If you would like to find out more information please visit http://owoh.org/.
Get your Think Tank gear while you can!
SCNPA has been accepted into Think Tank Photo’s Camera Club Program. Your club’s special code is CC-141.
You can enter this code right now by clicking here to see how the system works and you and your members can begin ordering.
Soon you will receive a program membership card with your unique code printed on it. We will distribute these to you ASAP. It’s a wonderful way for you to order the bags you need while supporting your organization.
If your order exceeds $50, you will receive for free, one of several bags of your choosing with the order.
Three times a year we will run reports on all of the orders placed by SCNPA through this special program and send a 20% commission check to the name and address you provided on the application form.
Thank you for participating in this program. We look forward to supporting
your efforts.
Clip contest entries for March
February is almost over and that means its time to start thinking about clips.
Just a reminder that they will be due on the 10th of March.
That should give everyone plenty of time to gather their clips and submit them. And if they were published online, it counts!
We had a good number of people enter January, but I would like to see more so get everyone on your staff to enter.
January is being judged by the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Richmond, VA and we should be getting the results back soon.
Take Care,
Nathan Gray
Moving forward by leaps and bounds.
Ok, I got a little impatient tonight and I decided to go ahead and take our new home in cyberspace online. There is no need to run around in a complete state of panic if you are needing to look at some photos, or find some previously stowed piece of information, the previous flash site is still available at the following URL. Just point your browsers to http://www.scnpa.org/07_archive or check out some of the links we have posted in the right hand column to get your pixel fix. This new site will continue to grow, and as it does your contributions will become an integral part of that growth. I look forward to hearing any suggestions you may have to offer.
Cheers,
Brett Flashnick
scnpa.org – admin