— Dane Creek

Well, it’s not quite a scam, but wow. I recently came across the Dwell/Blurb contest called World Views. They invite submissions through May 15th that show different takes on the modern world. An “esteemed panel of judges” will select the winners.

If you win, what do you get? Not much. A $250 gift certificate to Blurb, a year’s subscription to Dwell (worth $9.37 given current subscription prices at online magazine outlets), tickets to 2011 Dwell on Design (worth around $45), and “winning recognition and photo credit” in the book (which presumably, if you win, you’ll order copies of using your gift certificate).

Yeah, so the prize is kinda lame. But why am I so bothered by the competition? It’s because of the fine print. If you read the Rules & Regulations there’s the following gem:

8. Sponsors’ Ownership of Submissions: Each Submission becomes the exclusive property of Sponsors, and the contents, images, concepts and ideas embodied therein may be used by Sponsors for commercial, marketing and other promotional purposes. By entering a Submission, each entrant hereby irrevocably assigns to Sponsors all right, title and interest in and to the Submission and its contents, and agrees that Sponsors may use, reproduce, display, and distribute such Submission and its contents, without any compensation to or acknowledgment of the entrant (other than the prize, as set forth in these Official Rules). By entering a Submission, each entrant consents to the potential use of their entry in a photograph book to be co-produced and sold by Sponsors. Each entrant agrees that they will not receive any compensation even if Sponsors profit from the sales of the photography book.

In a nutshell: if you enter, they own your image. Period. They can do anything they want with it, forever. It’s not even that you’re giving them a non-exclusive license, you’re saying the image becomes their exclusive property.

Geez.

After much searching we have finally found a shopping cart that looks like it will be able to handle the intricate shipping options for folio covers.

The new cart is now live on the page and, fingers crossed, will now provide completely accurate shipping costs to any location worldwide, for any size folio order. There are likely a few bugs here and there to work out, but overall it should really help simplify our shipping!

Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 70-200 f/2.8L IS II with 1.4x. 280mm, ISO 100, 1/250 sec @ f/8.0.

As promised in my previous post here’s a photo from the Mesquite Flat Dunes in Death Valley, CA. I was apprehensive about shooing here as the world doesn’t really need more photos of rippling sand rolling across dunes. We saw many of those during the portfolio review, some better than others, but to borrow a term from JP I was suffering from dune fatigue.

At any rate, when shooting the dune field I really tried hard not to photograph the dunes. Instead I worked to make the dunes a supporting act for something else in the frame.

The above photo was taken while shooting with Glenn, a friend from Antarctica last year. We saw this scene from about 20 minutes out when walking and spent our entire shoot in and around it. I have at least 20 frames of this little scene from various angles and distances. But the second was the best!

Have you ever photographed sand dunes? What did you do to make them special?

Once our current stock of folios have sold out (there are 100 remaining) we will unfortunately be out of stock on covers until April. Availability of the paper used to make the covers is a problem all the way back to the mill that produces it, and the earliest they will deliver new stock to our supplier is April 7th.

We are currently researching other papers to replace the existing Royal Complements Charcoal, but realize this may be a problem for past customers who would like to colour match all their covers across different folio designs.

On the plus side, the next print run of covers will broaden the range of available colours to four. We will have a chocolate/maroon, royal blue, and light cream that will be added to the existing charcoal.

We’ll update the blog with more details as we sort out paper availability.