Photo District News has announced the 2005 Top-Knots competition for wedding photographers.

You can bet I will be entering this year. Will share with you my final choices. Perhaps I'll set up a poll where you all can vote on them. We'll see. I have so much first to do to set my office up at home, that this may just take a back seat till the early part of May.

Polaroid has announced the winners of the 5th International Awards.

There are links to the first four contests as well. In this day and age of digital, all awe inspiring.

One gripe and it's a big one – why can't one enlarge these images to see what they really look like? The postage stamps are perhaps meant to deter swiping them, but gee whiz, drop a watermark or something and be done with it.

Surya Sen has been recognized at the 2004 Ramnath Goenka India Press Photo Awards, in the General News Single category.

Instituted by The Indian Express Group as part of the birth centenary celebrations of its founder, Ramnath Goenka, the India Press Photo Awards attracted 2,795 entries from across India, from regional newspapers and English-language national newsmagazines, from agency regulars, sports photographers, conflict-zone junkies.

CAPTION: Sarita's former husband M. Mahendra Reddy drank pesticide and died, leaving behind a pregnant wife and a two-year old daughter. Photography © Surya Sen

Expect to see more of Sen's work here in the next couple of days.

Writer, photojournalist and blogger, Joshua Newtown has won the 2004 Luis Valtueña International Humanitarian Photography Award.

His photograph of a Chamar Dalit woman falling into frenzy at a prayer session in an Uttar Pradesh village was chosen for the Special Prize under the category of ‘Women and new slavery’. He will receive Euros 1500 (Rs. 78,000 approx) and a citation. The award is instituted by global humanitarian organisation Médicos del Mundo based in Madrid, Spain.

A former freelancer with Associated Press and Blitz Weekly, Newton has reported for over fifty print and web publications around the world. He runs a popular blog-column called REPORTAGE.

Newton will attend the awards ceremony in Madrid on January 25, 2005. An exhibition of award-winning photographs will tour European countries for the next two years. Interested in submitting your work for this competition? Click here to download the PDF.

Abir Abdullah, an award-winning photographer and friend from Bangladesh and Harish Tyagi, a budding photojournalist based in Delhi, India have won awards at the annual UNICEF Photo Of the Year 2004 competition.

Abir won second place for a gruesome image of rescue workers pulling the limp body of a six-year old child after a six-storey, 100-year old building collapsed at midnight on June, 9 2004 in Dhaka.

Harish Tyagi's image of a child navigating his way in a garbage dump received an honorable mention.

What Abir and Harish have in common (other than working in South Asia) is that they are both deeply committed to documenting children and the environment they live in.