There are some beautiful images doing the rounds on the internet at the moment of outer space and various planets. The shots are made even more incredible when you learn that they were created by an amateur astronomer who captured them from his front yard.

Reddit user tirceol posted some of his fathers images, which he captured by hooking up a camera to his telescopes eyepiece.

After being plagued by finacial worries, and legal troubles that almost lost her the rights to her own collection of work, Leibovitz said she had been left feeling "emotionally and mentally depleted".

However, she is fighting back being with a brand new exhibition that has just opened in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The project on show is a departure from her normal celebrity portrait work, and in fact was inspired by the humble family snapshot.

The exhibition called "Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage" includes scenery and historical objects such as Sigmund Freud's couch and Elvis Presley's Harley-Davidson.

“It’s a project I did for myself. I wanted to be seduced into a photograph and not make it up,” she said. “And I wanted to take my time.”

http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/archive/2012/leibovitz/

After the success of our last two Australia Day photo competitions we thought that we would put a bit of effort in this year and really make the most of it!

So, we have created a competition especially for our members to all share their favourite Aussie shots, whether they are shots taken on Australia Day itself or simply a photo you feel represents this sunburnt country of ours!

Not only will it create a collection to share with each other but at the end the team at Photo Art will pick out their top 50 images which will be included in our annual Australia Day photo book, which will be avaliable for sale in early March!

Additionally the team will chose their top three images who will recieve a gift voucher for Photo Art Centre so they can turn their entries into real memories!

Beginning on the 26th of January you can submit your images into the,

Australia Day 2012!

Two years after the earthquake that devastated Haiti, much of the country is still struggling to recover. However photographer Maggie Steber who has worked in the country for decades is also upset at the damage that the subsequent media coverage has caused, with all the images coming out of the country only show the damage and suffering. So Steber wants to show the world that there is more to Haiti that what we see on the news by giving the power back to the people.

Working with the FotoKonbit organisation she is giving students in their workshops access to Holga cameras in order to capture their daily lives and communities.

The results were a stunning series of complex images, “When you see what Haitians think is beautiful to photograph, important, profound,” says Steber, “you learn more about them than anything an outsider can show you. To put cameras in the hands of Haitians give them the power to show us what they think is important.”

fotokonbit.org

French born Damien Blottiere orginally studied fashion design before his hobby of cutting up his photography to create colleges was spotted by Dazed & Confused editor Cathy Edwards.

Although he now shoots fashion photography for numerous publications it is his colleges have caught the attention of brands such as Stella McCartney and Pierre Hardy who have commissioned his "hand-made" imagery for their campaigns.

He used to be inspired by his own fantasies, but these days he’s more interested in his subjects. “I’ve always been fascinated by bodies and I try to go underneath as well as around them,” he says. “I try to combine imagines of different times, perceptions or points of view. For example, on one picture I will show my subject dressed, getting dressed and naked, all at the same time. I’m probably greedy and unsatisfiable so I need to gather different parts or moments to show what my subject wants me to tell or what I want him to say.”

Showing this month in the Australian Centre of Photography is a project that caught our attention for it unforgiving rawness that strips photography back to the basics.

Angophora Obscura by Benjamin Stone-Herbert is a collection of prints created using a home-made, lensless, wooden camera. Intended to capture the wildness of the trees and the beauty of the natural light.

Rebelling against the ease and accessibility and speed of digital photography Herbert brings photography back it's bare bones an emphasisizes the time-consuming process that has gone into each piece. With some of the exposures taking up to an hour to complete.

"My hands-on approach, from building the camera, developing the film to hand-making the final print, for me returns photography from the way we experience it today to its original pure form."

Showing in the ACP gallery until 15th January 2012

A new exhibition has been opened, curated by photographer Martin Parr, in Liverpool, England. It explores the obsession with celebrity culture and includes the work of two photographers Richard Simpkin and Simone Lueck. 

Australian photographer Simpkin is a ‘star-hunter' whose work questions identity and social boundaries. What began as a personal project to photograph himself with celebrities soon became a lifelong mission which has produced a collection of over 1000 images. "Knowing how difficult it is to get access to celebrities in this day and age, it is an awesome achievement, and turns his whole game into a compelling piece of art", Parr says of the work.

LA-based Lueck's project 'The Once and Future Queens' is the result of what happened when the artist posted an advert on Craigslist inviting older women to be photographed in the guise of their favourite film star.

The exhibition runs from the 13th January to 18th March 2012 in the Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool.

A gallery in Amsterdam has just opened an exhibition by artist Erik Kessels that aims to show us just how buried by images we are in this Digital age.

Named "Photography in Abundance", the project concentrates on Flickr, which recently passed the 6 billion photo mark. Kessel realised however that our capacity to comprehend this number is limited. So to put it into perspective he has printed every image uploaded onto the site in a 24 hour period.

The result is literally piles of images filling the gallery space. There have been some complaints that the project is wasteful, but those people should perhaps be glad that Kessel choose Flickr who recently announced that they recieve roughly 6 billion photos per month!

Erik Kessel at the Foam Gallery

Our friends at Corel have launched a brand new site full of great tutorials on how to incorporate the latest effects and styles into your photographic repertoire.

Some highlights include getting the perfect HDR effect, the techniques of using your photography to create time lapse and stop motion videos and getting that magazine style glamour makeover on your portraits.

Get a comprehensive step by step guide on creating professional looking effects at home.

The site also give you the option to trial their software for free! Check it out, the site is available in three languages:

English

Chinese

Japanese

Don't forget you can win an amazing range of Corel software in our latest competition Life's Treasures, why not ENTER NOW!

For anyone who has ever been to a theme park will understand how hauntingly surreal this photos are.

Uk photographer Catherine Hyland shot her series 'Wonderland' in China's abandoned version of Disney World just outside Beijing, which was supposed to be the biggest theme park in all of Asia before funding was cut.

Now all that remains are the skeletons of abandonded structures in cornfields. “At first glance you wouldn’t be blamed for thinking you had walked into some post-apocalyptic scene straight out of Cormac Mccarthy’s The Road,” explains Hyland “There is a strange allure to what the locals are doing here, that creeps up on you in the most unsuspecting manner.”

www.catherinehyland.co.uk

After surviving terrible conditions shooting Ernest Shackleton's epic Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition from 1914 to 1917. Australian photographer Frank Hurley's images will finally go on display in Buckingham Palace nearly a century after he hand delivered them to King George V to share their story.

The images showed an amazing tale of survival from the bottom of the world, from a strong technical photographer.

He shares the exhibition which is the first of it's kind for the palace with English photographer Herbert Pointing who shot Robert Scott's ill fated attempt to reach the pole first.

Hurley famously showed his unflinching dedication to his craft by diving into icy waters to retrieve glass negatives stored in the sinking ship Endurance.

Hurley was allowed to keep only 120 of 520 negatives from the foundering Endurance to reduce weight for the troubled expedition. The remaining 400 negatives were smashed to stop him trying to reboard the slowly sinking ship.

Exhibition curator Sophie Gordon says it is a shame the images were lost. "Hurley was a highly accomplished photographer and he had an eye for a good photograph . . . that is several hundred photographs that we have lost," she says. "That is a big loss."

The Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition is always one that we like to look out for. The image entries let us see beyond the capabilities of our unaided eyes. This year there were almost 2000 entries from 70 countries in the 37th annual contest.

Both Scientists and photographers entered the competition turning their attention onto a wide range of subjects, living and man-made, from flies to granite compounds, sometimes magnifying them over 2000 times their original size. Below are just a couple of the amazing images shortlisted -

The double compound eyes of a male St. Mark’s fly (Bibio marci) photographed with reflected (episcopic) diffuse illumination by Dr. David Maitland of Feltwell, UK. (Dr. David Maitland)

Graphite-bearing granulite from Kerala, India in polarized light at 2.5x magnification by Dr. Bernardo Cesare of the Department of Geosciences in Padova, Italy.

nikonsmallworld.com

The Malian Ministry of Culture with the help of the Institut Fancais has created perhaps one of the most influence photograhy event in Africa. Bamako Encounters, now in it's 9th year is An African Photography Biennial offers artists exceptional opportunities to meet fellow artist as well as industry professionals from around the world.

Running from 1st November 2011 to 1st January 2012, this years theme is "For A Sustainable World" reflects the social and political commitments of African artists. Artists are invited to explore the theme in any way they deem appropriate.

Those who are lucky enough to have their work chosen will be exhibited in galleries around the world, raising awareness andcintrbuting to the development of the African art market as well as rasing their own profile more than could be possible on their own.

 www.rencontres-­bamako.com

One the orginal lomo apps Hipstamatic brought us the first examples of interchanable backs and lenses, but eventually lost ground to the ever popular Instagram. However they are hoping to regain some downloads with their latest concept, recreating the film experience.

The latest app will make you take 24 images before you can see them all at once. In an attempt to recreate the excitement and anticpation of waiting till you have burned through a roll before seeing your latest work.

They orginally planned to take the concept further by making you pay to get the images printed and sent to your home before you could get them see them.

"It’s the coolest idea ever but we can’t use an in-app system for it," explained founder Lucas Buick. "We’d have to take your credit card details when you downloaded the app and you’d end up paying to shoot stuff that you can’t even see. I could already see the one star reviews."

The app will be avaliable by the end of the month.

In the mean time why not relive the excitement of the printed photograph with our latest offer from Photo Art Centre. 20% off all photo prints!

In conjunction with the Melbourne Festival, the Contemporary Centre for Photography brings us 'In Camera and In Public'.

There is always plenty of controversy surrounding the legalities of street photography; privacy disputes, terrorism laws and copyright issues are constantly filling the newspapers.
'In Camera and in Public' confronts these issues head on by exhibiting some of the most famous and controversial street photography projects. Some of the featured work includes Bill Henson, Sonia Leber, Kohei Yoshiyuki and Sydney photographer Cherine Fahd.

Fahd's project caused a stir when rather than portraying the message of how beautiful the private, mediative gestures displayed in public where. People instead questioned whether she had crossed a line morally.

The project was images taken of homeless people and locals sleeping in the Kings Cross park, as seen from the security of Fahd's apartment 6 floors above. All her subjects were anonymous and no faces could be seen, but the issue was still raised whether taking a person image without them knowing was right.

Decide for yourself as the exhibition runs til the 25th of October at the ccp.org.au

The Park 51 Islamic community centre, dubbed the 'Ground Zero Mosque' last year faced huge opposition from Islamophobic activists and right-wing politicians during it's development close to the site of the old twin towers.

However, despite all the controversy the centre has now opened its doors to the public for it's first event, a photography exhibition.

The exhibition looks at photographer Danny Goldfield's latest project titled 'NYChildren' which is attempting to photograph a child from every country in the world living in New York City.

He started the project in 2003 after meeting Rana Sodhi, a Sikh whose brother was murdered in a hate crime following 9/11. His efforts to reach out to people in his neighbourhood to eliminate prejudices and fears inspired Goldfield create NYChildren.

dannygoldfield.com

In the midst of the Ballarat International Foto Biennale festival there is a refreshing project trying to draw attention to young photographers.

The Shutterup project from ABC aims to break the sterotype that generation y is all twitpic and instgram.
They visited schools in various regions of Victoria to hold photography workshops. The students were then unleashed to capture their vision with some impressive results.

The images captured are on display for the duration of the festival in Central Square and in the Ballarat Art Gallery.

open.abc.net.au/projects/shutterup-online

A Ukranian travel photographer has captured a lighting phenomenon so rare that he had to ask several experts to identify it.

This amazing fire rainbow or 'circumzenithal arc' is produced when light from sun or reflected from the moon passes through ice crystals in high-level cirrus clouds, and can only be seen at very specific latitute and angle.

Photographer Anton Jankovoy came across the phenomena in Nepal, it required a f/4 aperture and an exposure time of 1/400 of a second. He said about the event 'For the last couple of years I've seen a lot of rare and interesting light phenomena like halos, convex clouds, mirages, brocken spectres and fog bows.But it was the first time I saw this phenomenon and I was completely astonished'

After years in the archive, iconic photojournalist Steve McCurry is sharing his collection of 9/11 kodachrome shots, along with his experience with the world for the first time.

As part of American Photo's 9/11: The Photographers' Stories, McCurry tells of what he saw that day "I got my camera bag and went up on the roof of my building and started photographing the towers. We didn’t even know it was a plane, because we were up on the roof without the radio or TV. We all thought it was a fire that would eventually be put out—a terrible disaster, I mean both towers were on fire. I figured I’d shoot it from my roof for about 20 minutes and then go down to the base.. And then they just fell."

"I got up at 3:30 in the morning and walked back down there. As you can imagine, there was serious security: police, firemen, soldiers. But it was very clear to me this needed to be documented. I knew I had to do whatever I had to do to get back down there. I found a way to sneak in by cutting through a fence, and it allowed me to spend the morning of September 12 there."

"I eventually got removed by the police. They were really angry—the police, the firemen, everyone down there; emotions were running very high. One fireman threatened to beat my brains in with a shovel. I understood their position completely. From their point of view, we were there as tourists or spectators, when really we were there to record history, to create a record of this evil deed."

"After I did my intial edit of my photos for the Times, I didn’t really look at them for several years, until I started doing a major edit through my entire archive, going through work from my entire career. At that point it became more of a historical document. I had to scan them. At this point if things aren’t scanned, in a way they don’t exist. The whole point was to document this disaster, this tragedy. I needed to do it as a testimony to what happened out there."