It’s that time of year again!  Time to enter the FotoWeek DC Awards Competition!  This year there are even more reasons to enter as soon as you can.  Not only will you be eligible for the Early Bird 20% off discount if you enter by midnight on July 31, but if you are one of the first 100 entrants, you will receive a free FotoPage site, which is valued at $49!  If you haven’t heard about FotoPage yet, you will soon.

On July 22nd, FotoWeek DC is launching its new Photographers’ Portfolio Portal, where photographers can subscribe for a nominal annual cost, post their work and get discovered.  Curators will be trolling the site for the most exciting and innovative work to be featured in exhibitions throughout the city and buyers will be able to search by category for your work.

Hope to see your great images online soon and good luck in the competition as well, where you can win as much as $5,000!

Here we go again! Let’s make 2010 the best year ever for FotoWeek DC!

Hop over to our finalist web site to see the entire list of Fotoweek winners from the general and youth contests.  Those of you on the list for the youth contest should be notified soon.  We look forward to seeing all of the winning photos displayed proudly at Fotoweek Central, 3338 M Street NW.

We’ve been getting a lot of inquiries about the Fotoweek contest winners.  Notices were sent out via email about a week ago, so if you haven’t been checking your inbox, please do so (notices are only sent to the winners).  We’ve been trying to iron out a few of the typical issues, and hope to have the list of finalists online very soon.  You’ll see it here on the blog when that happens.

Right now, people are only being notified as “finalists.”  These talented folks get a ticket to our big gala that wraps up the week of festivities, and will learn what place they finished during the awards ceremony.

The jurors have been hard at work this week looking through the thousands and thousands of photos that everyone submitted to our contest. We’ve picked our first round and are plowing our way through the slew of amazing shots to proclaim winners in every category. As one of the judges, I can say it’s so exciting to see the level of talent that Fotoweek attracted. Even in the amateur category, competition is extremely stiff.

We’re hoping to get the word out very soon to the winners, so keep your eyes peeled if you submitted your work. In the meantime, head over to our contest page to drool over our $37,600 in prizes, like Epson printers, shopping sprees at Chrome Imaging and Penn Camera, and straight-up cash. We’ll be handing out awards at the big gala at the end of Fotoweek, to celebrate the D.C. regions’ photography community together. Each of the winning photographs will be on display the entire week at our headquarters in Georgetown (more on the exciting things going on in that building next week).

Remember the Youth Contest is still accepting entries from kids K through 12th grade. Send in your photos of People, Animals, Landscapes or Sports until October 24, when Fotoweek and The Washington Post will select winners in three grade categories for more prizes. The winners will be displayed with the adult contest winners at our Georgetown venue. We can’t wait to see them all!

We’ve reached the second deadline today for the FotoWeek DC contest. Get your images in by tonight at 11:59 p.m.; otherwise you’ll have to pay an additional $10 fee per image to submit them between tomorrow and September 29.

Read our quick summary here of why you should participate in the contest (fantastic prizes! region-wide acclaim! honors bestowed by distinguished judges!), then get over to the official site to get those images in.

Good luck!

Everyone at FotoWeek is thrilled to launch a new way for even more people to get involved with the festival — a contest for youth, in partnership with The Washington Post. Anyone in grades K through 12, throughout D.C., Maryland and Virginia, can submit their images in four categories: portraits, animals, landscape and sports.

FotoWeek Board Member Irene Owsley is heading up this effort, and told us:

We wanted kids to be involved in FotoWeek from the very beginning. Reaching out directly to the schools and their art programs through a youth photo contest seemed the best approach, and The Washington Post offered to partner with us in this effort.

In the big picture, however, FotoWeek DC is about celebrating great imagery and about this larger community we live in supporting that. In Washington DC, we have not only some very talented photographers but we have amazingly rich collections of photography to visit and to learn from. We need to expose our kids to that, and encourage them to participate. What better way than to bring them into the fold through their own forays into image-making?

I like the idea that possibly, by entering this contest, kids could begin to discern what makes a striking or successful image.

Entering is free, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be any fantastic prizes. FotoWeek will choose 37 winners in all, and each one will be displayed at our festival hub in Georgetown and in the exhibition at the Post. First place winners in each age group, for each category, will take home a cool $250, while second and third place get digital cameras. An overall Best in Show prize of $1000 goes to one lucky contestant.

Even better, perhaps, is that the art departments at the schools of the first place winners will each receive a digital camera worth about $300, to keep encouraging creativity throughout the school year. As Irene says, “FotoWeek DC has a definite philanthropic bent, and it is aimed particularly at the schools. It was always in our minds to benefit the community — whether it’s by donating equipment or by other means of enrichment.”

Click over to the FotoWeek web site for the directions for entering the youth contest, and get those entries in before October 24. We’ll be looking forward to finding our future Richard Avedons and National Geographic photographers — oh, and Jay Sumner, photo editor of the National Geographic Kids magazine is one of the jurors, so she’ll most definitely be looking out for them!

We’ve got a new video to promote the FotoWeek contest (did we mention the deadline is September 22?), by David Snider of The Photography Channel. Please feel free to share the video on your own blog or web site.

Along with our many categories for Professionals, Students and Amateurs in the FotoWeek DC contest, we have one catch-all category that anyone can (and should!) enter: the Spirit of Washington, DC.

With one image, capture the spirit and essence of Washington, D.C. Find that visual expression of what makes this city, our nation’s capitol, unique among American cities, and what distinguishes its singular character.

The whopping $5,000 prize was donated by Bill Regardie, who will also be the judge for this category. In 1981 he founded Regardie’s Magazine: The Business of Washington, which was known for both its crack coverage, breaking stories on several financial scandals in the 80s, as well as its top-notch photography. Bill told us, “At Regardie’s, both the editor and art director reported to me because I believed both kinds of content were equally important.”

Bill has lived in Washington, DC his entire life, attending both undergrad and graduate school at American University. On his staff at Regardie’s, he oversaw some amazing talent. Photographers Rhoda Baer and William Coupon snapped their shutters for the magazine, while art directors such as Fred Woodward and John Korpics cut their teeth at Regardie’s before taking the reins at publications like Rolling Stone and GQ. In other words: Bill knows talent when he sees it.

We asked Bill why he chose to fund the Spirit of Washington Award for FotoWeek.

I felt that a $5,000 (winner take all) prize would make significant statement and encourage both amateurs and professionals to go for it. Further, the concept of The Spirit of Washington would hopefully capture what I feel about the city I was born in and has given me so much. I felt that a distinctively local photo competition would be appreciated by the talented (as well as the unknown amateurs) photographers, and stimulate participation by all.

We have no doubt we’ll see some incredible images in this category. Remember the final deadline is September 22, so click over to the Contest web site and get all the info you need to submit your photos that bring Washington, D.C. to life.

The FotoWeek contest will be one of the most exciting parts of the festival in November. Unlike most of the events at the galleries and museums around town, which will be filled with the work of tons of established, distinguished, and historically important photographers, the contest is a chance for anyone in the community to get their work seen by thousands. Professionals, students, and amateurs all have a chance to get a winning photo displayed at our venue in Georgetown.

We’ve already received a ton of entries, and can’t wait to see the final set when the end of September rolls around. Have you seen that list of jurors, by the way? The FotoWeek high rollers don’t end with huge venues and exhibits by founding fathers of photography: the jury panel is crammed with talent. If you submit your work, imagine it being viewed by Deanne Fitzmaurice, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, Joyce Tenneson, the Lucie Awards 2005 Fine Art Photographer of the Year, or photographer and human rights activist Tipper Gore, and that’s only the beginning. Architects, photo editors for National Geographic and the Smithsonian magazines, museum directors and curators are all on the panel. Not to be too intimidated, the panel includes quite a few local folk, like your blog writer here, who are very much looking forward to finding all kinds of new talent among the masses, for whom FotoWeek will surely be just the beginning.

And the awards? Oh the awards! $37,500 in prizes will be handed out in the professional, amateur, and student categories, as well as our special category, The Spirit of Washington. In addition to cash, winners will take home shopping sprees and gift certificates at Chrome Imaging and Penn Camera, Epson photo printers, lunches with the head honchos at National Geographic, and more. Not to mention what just might be better than all of that: bragging rights to say you were a winner among such a distinguished crowd.

We’ll bring you some more details on the contest soon — including some exciting events for the kids. In the meantime, head over to our contest web site and read through the submission details. Get those entries in by September 22!