It's time to take out your cameras, think hard and start shooting... It does not matter whether you are a professional or an amateur (like myself) :).... There is room for everyone...

There are 11 categories where photos can be submitted: Abstract, Advertising, Architectural, Fashion, Music / Performance, Nature, Nude, Portraiture, Photojournalism / Documentary, Science and Sport.

The winner on the amateur side, gets to be invited to the the awards ceremony which will be held at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes, France on 24 April 2008. Not bad, huh ...

I've been shooting in Digital form for a little less than a year now, up to this point I have not got the guts or the time to shoot in RAW format, I was always dependent on the JPG format which is directly produced by the camera...

Until I finally decided to explore how this whole RAW thing works out... I had a good incentive too, I was going to shoot a night photography session with relatively long exposures (30 seconds), so I thought this might be the right time to make use of this...

The experience turned out to be great, the main virtues I found for shooting in RAW are:

(1) Being able to select the color temperature (white balance) of the shot, which turned out being a great option

(2) More control over the quality of the image in terms of how the final product should look like

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