Together with major sponsor Nikon, the Walkley Foundation celebrates the best in Australian press photography each year. This year the competition was open to any photographer who submitted a picture for publication in an Australian media outlet in the 12 months from September 1, 2008 to August 31, 2009. 

Nikon-Walkley photographic categories include:

• News photography
• Daily life/feature photography
• Sport
• Photographic essay
• Nikon-Walkley Press Photographer of the Year

Nikon-Walkley Photographic Prizes include:

• Spot news
• General news
• Community & regional photography
• Portrait photography

Check out the gallery of some of the finalists below and view more here.

There is something for every man in GQ’s list of the 50 Most Stylish Men. From Kerouac to Clooney, McQueen to Newman and Ali to Jordan. Don’t take it too seriously, but it’s a nice catalogue of cool.  Just be sure to read the bio’s.

Google celebrated the invention of everyone’s favourite method of automatic identification and data collection today, the Bar Code. The first patent for a bar code type product (US Patent #2,612,994) was issued to inventors Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver on October 7, 1952. Random fact: The first product to have a bar code included was a packet of Wrigley’s Gum.

Just looking through Portland-based company Shwood’s new collection gives me wood! As their website states, “Shwood is handcrafted eyewear created with the intent of individuality and uniqueness that can only be found in natural surroundings.” And, yep, you guessed it, Shwood use wood. Their in-house manufacturing process merges precision technology with classic skilled craftsmanship. Every step from veneering and precision ply cutting, to shaping and finishing is conducted in their workshop to promise an entirely handcrafted eyewear piece. Wood manipulation is kept to a minimum in order to maintain the natural aesthetic. All models are accompanied by 100% UVA/UVB protection Carl Zeiss lenses imported from Italy. Oh yeah, and Polarized lenses are also available. Their debut model, the Canby, was inspired by James Dean and lays lays the groundwork for an entire wood revolution.

A new TVC for South African investment company Allan Gray imagines what life would have been like for James Dean had he not died in a car crash aged just 24. Ad agecy King James teamed up with director, Keith Rose, from Velocity Films to bring the creative to life. A combination of make-up, prosthetics, body doubles and CG face replacement helps bring the legendary actor to life – and then ages him, showing a rather realistic version of what might have been. He is shown receiving a lifetime achievement Oscar, as a director, protesting against the Vietnam War, and getting his Angelina Jolie on while being a humanitarian ambassador.

The idea of exploiting a Hollywood great like Dean to sell insurance may leave a bad taste in your mouth. But, in some ways, I think it helps to prolong his memory and exposes his talent to a younger generation who may not understand his cultural relevance. Allan Gray are by no means the first to do it. Ford did something similar with Steve McQueen in the TVC for the launch of the Puma some years ago.

The teaser trailer for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Inception was released in some US theaters with Inglourious Basterds last Friday, and the one-minute clip is now online. Inception is Nolan’s first original screenplay since The Dark Knight. The tagline of the movie is,”Your mind is the scene of the crime”. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page (Juno), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (500 Days of Summer) and Batman veterans, Cillian Murphy and Michael Caine, /Film is calling Inception a “a contemporary sci-fi actioner set within the architecture of the mind”. So, it sounds like your average Nolan mindfuck then. Can’t wait.

[via Flavorwire]

Melbourne-based artist Buff Diss uses masking tape to create his pieces. Me likey.

It turns out Robert Smith? (question mark intentional!) has done the math, quite literally. A chapter in a forthcoming book on modeling infectious diseases called, “When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modeling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection”, tells the story.

If you try to quarantine the zombies you won’t catch them all, so “it’s basically humans fighting it out with slightly fewer zombies than there were before.” That’s not what you want, given that you’re dealing with flesh-eating, undead monsters that will either kill you or bite you and turn you into one of them.

If you go for a cure, “unless the cure was 100%, which it would never be in reality, you can’t turn all the zombies back.” You wind up with “this equilibrium where people are always switching back and forth” between human and zombie. Entirely unsatisfactory.

The only solution — and if we haven’t learned this from zombie movies, we haven’t learned a damn thing — is to mount wave after wave of military attacks.

Read more here.

If you dig graff or light writing, you’ll love desinger Aïssa Logerot’s latest project. Logerot has manufactured a fake aerosol can, called the Halo, which simply replaces the traditional nozzle with a tiny LED.  The Halo preserves the techniques and gestures of graffiti and transfers them to light writing. It is possible to change the color and the brightness of the LED to change the graffiti’s styles. If the light doesn’t have enough battery, users simply have to shake it to have energy again.

Turn off the lights and get busy!

[via Cool Hunting]

I’m always fascinated to learn how technology and new media is impacting on human development (see my previous post, Surfing the Web: It’s good For You). Without doubt, popular culture has become more complex – due in large part to the fragmentation of traditional media. This, in turn, has required cognitive adaptation and has impacted how we interpret and interact with the world.

 There’s a great article by Emily Yoffe on Slate at the moment that posits our addiction to information is a biological imperative which drives our seemingly endless need to check our Facebook profiles for updates or lose oursleves searching on Google. Researchers refer to this desire as seeking or wanting, an activity that affects the dopamine centers of our brains and causes us to chase the potential reward just around the corner (the reward being information). Here’s the rub: the possiblity of a payoff is much more stimulating than actually getting one. This quest for what “might be” creates a feedback loop where consumption continuously renews the appetite.

Since we’re restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting. Novelty is one. Panksepp says the dopamine system is activated by finding something unexpected or by the anticipation of something new. If the rewards come unpredictably—as e-mail, texts, updates do—we get even more carried away.

Perhaps, suggests Yoffe, “we’ve now created the perfect machines to allow us to seek endlessly”.

Read the full article here.