IRIS & Me - Jon Pountney

Jon Pountney has been documenting the annual Iris Prize since its inception in 2006, as well as the short films made by winners of the prize.

Running for the duration of the 2016 Festival, this new exhibition - audio/visual and stills photography - offers a window on the world of film production as well as offering previously unseen behind-the-scenes coverage of the eight Iris Prize Productions to date.

We went along to view the exhibition and spoke with Jon about the project.

The exhibition at the Park Inn Hotel in Cardiff ends Sunday 16th October and AV screenings at nightly at 6.30pm

Follow Jon on Twitter @C_before_C
Find out more about the IRIS Prize Festival on www.irisprize.org and on Twitter @irisprize

The Philip Jones Griffiths Award

The inaugural 2016 Award from the Philip Jones Griffiths Foundation is offering a £10,000 prize to a photographer of any age with a significant body of work in the genre of Documentary photography.

The deadline to apply is 10th October 2016 - so be quick!

More information on the Award, photographer and the Foundation can be found on the website www.philipjonesgriffiths.org but see below for a summary of submission criteria. 

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National Library of Wales Curator Will Troughton speaking with Ffoton's Emyr Young

Rondo Media TV Director Caryl Ebenezer talking to Ffoton's Brian Carroll

You can listen to our previous Ffoton News items where we speak with the curator of the 2015 Philip Jones Griffiths exhibition at the National Library of Wales; and our conversation with the Producer/Director of the S4C Documentary on the photographer.

Pixelrights offer 30% discount to Ffoton followers

Announced a few weeks back with our sixth #urbanwales ticket winner for The EYE International Photography Festival, Pixelrights have partnered with Ffoton to offer our followers and Podcast subscribers a massive 30% discount on all new Pixelrights online portfolio accounts - for the lifetime of the account!!

If you're looking to refresh your photography website or create your very first online photography portfolio to promote your work, take a few moments (or 14 days with the free trial!) to explore the features offered by Pixelrights and compare them to other hosted website alternatives. We're sure you'll agree that the 30% discount (for the lifetime of your account) offers fantastic value for money, with the added benefit of leading-edge technology working behind the scenes to protect your image copyright. 

We've provided some of the background to their new technology below, but have a look at this in-depth interview with Pixelrights executives on Shutterbug for more detail on the copyright security advances made by the company.

Pixel rights, based here in the UK, have created their new .PXLR image format for the benefit of the online photographic and creative community. The .PXLR image format improves the rendering of your images on screen and helps to protect your photos from accidental and intended theft, through the use of technology and notifying/educating visitors to your website.

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For those interested in the technical wizardry behind the scenes, here's what happens when you upload one of your photograph JPEG's to your Pixelrights account...
Pixelrights image server converts the original JPEG into the encrypted .PXLR format, creating ready-to-transmit image data files at several sizes which are cached on their servers, in increments of 50-100px.
When the SmartFrame is rendered in the front end, the most appropriate size is selected and displayed. In order to achieve 100% pixel-perfect rendering, SmartFrame can be set to resize in the same increments as the cached image data files. 
This is the technique used in all Pixelrights portfolios and it helps to avoid blurred images and render quality visuals each time, particularly noticeable when resizing patterns and thin lines.