• In order to enter your film needs to fulfill a few criteria
• It must be no more than 5 minutes long
• It must be on the theme ‘My Place’
• It must be supplied on a PAL DVD
• A films must be able to be showed via single channel projection - so this excludes any multi screen films.
• You must supply a CV, a short artists statement and an official application form.

The closing date for applications is the 31st of October this year.

For more details please contact: KDodd@carmarthenshire.gov.uk

Now Light Room 2 is out. I’ve not played with the product myself yet - that’s not due to any lack of enthusiasm - just a reflection on a maturing in my Photo software use. My library of images is now so large I don’t want to mess around with pre-launch betas for safeties sake. 

Anyway all this is just a diversion. I’ve been looking at the specs on Lightroom 2 and its new features look like a major enhancement to Lightrooms ability to organise and enhance photos. It looks like an essential purchase or upgrade from where I am sitting.

So if you like Lightroom or are thinking about some high quality photograph workflow software take a look at Lightroom 2. I have a feeling you won’t be disappointed. For more details click here for the Adobe site.

Of course if you cannot reach it then keep an eye on the new media itself. You can bet that there will be many many blog entries - many made live at the event that will help those who cannot go get a feel of it.

That’s the nice thing about new media - it can be incred

ibly fast to report something, with as many different flavours as there are producers.

If you’d like more information the Expo can be found at:

http://www.newmediaexpo.com

Unfortunately I don’t have a working URL for the Festival to give you at the moment - hopefully better contact details will be forthcoming in the future.

Technorati Tags: Chepstow, Arts, Festival

I’m going to introduce you to 280Slides.com. This is presentation software that looks and feels like Apple Keynote. If you work on Windows then you may not have heard of Keynote. So I’ll fill you in. Keynote is good presentation software. It easily produces presentations that outshine MS Powerpoint.

Anyway back to 280Slides. Modelled very much on the Apple Interface (in fact If I’ve got my facts right then this is web software based on the famous Mac API).

280Slides simply put lets you create downloadable presentations through the web for nothing. It works very well and you don’t even have to sign up. Simply put you just go to the website, create a presentation, download it and use it. Wonderful!

So how does this fit in with Shared Creation. After all only business people use presentation software?

Well not true. Sometimes everyone needs to show something, to demonstrate something, to convey something, and to teach something. It also means you can create a very cool display to run behind a band for example. You may not need presentation software, and you certainly don’t want to pay for it. Yet you may need it. This is where 280slides comes in - pop online, make what you want and carry on.

It makes sense to me.

Creativity leads to communication and this is all about enabling communication.

Technorati Tags: 280slides, apple, mac, keynote, presentation, web, powerpoint

Put very simply Photrade is a combination of a photograph sharing website (think the venerable favourite Flickr) and a stock photography site (think istockphoto).

The idea seems simple. “Lets do photo sharing - and create a community, whilst also adding a stock photography option”, in other words bring the worlds of photography, social networking and stock photography together.

You may think that’s cool, and it is, but the concept is actually even stronger than that. Fortunately there is a short video that describes the concept beautifully - and you can view that at
http://www.photrade.com/tour.php?pg=3

I’m not going to run through all the features simply because the video does a good job - you should watch it. Essentially what it says is this - you should share your photos, protect your copyright and if you want to - take a shot at selling and merchandising them. I like this. Not because I am die hard money grabber. But because some should make it easier to help photographers get started, and this site looks like a nice mix of community and professional service. In fact they have firmly nailed their stance on helping photographers by launching the HyperPhocal blog - aimed at teaching the art of photography.

Its a nice idea, and I hope it does well - its out there working to elevate photographic skills.

Celtx media pre-production system recently hit version 1 and is available for download. I started playing with Celtx some time ago and still think it is a good solution to the problem of filing and sharing all of the production details for things such as films, plays, LARP, books, comics, video casts.

It is also free.

If you’re looking for something to really help organise everything for a production take a look at Celtx at http://www.celtx.com/

I’ve been looking over the list of performances and special projections lined up and it looks very impressive and definitely worth attending. In fact the list of good things is so impressive that I  You can find out more by visiting http://openear.wordpress.com/

On Sunday 29th June there is the Museum of The Moment Workshop. This is a day of workshops to help you explore the city through mobile phone video, photography, fiction, oral history or recording. If you want to know more about how to creatively interact with a city this could be a good day for you. Its being run by the Arcades Project - for more details go www.arcadesproject.org and click on take part.

On Tuesday 17th of June Jane Hutt AM - Education Minister will launch "Make Light Work" a new publication from Ffotogallery celebrating 10 years of innovative projects carried out by Ffootgallerys education department.

A little closer to this moment is Friday the 13ths launch of the I Hate Green exhibition at Turner House Gallery in Penarth and features work by: Keith Arnatt, David Bailey, Rut Blees Luxemburgm, John Davies, Haydn Denman, Peter Fraser, Clive Landen, Ron McCormick, Calum Angus MacKay Francesca Odell, William Tsui, Ray Moore, Catherine Yass

To learn more about Ffotogallery and its activities visit http://www.ffotogallery.org/