The Ballarat International Foto Biennale [BIFB] has just been accepted for membership into the Festival de la Luz or Festival of Light [FOL], a grouping of 32 festivals of photography worldwide, including some of the biggest and most important similar events on 5 continents. The announcement was made in Buenos Aires by FOL Director and Director General of the Argentina Festival ‘Enceuntros Abiertos’ Ms Elda Harrington.
Ballarat is the first Australian photography festival to be accepted as a member festival, following the hugely successful BIFB’09 in September, and membership gives recognition to the impact that such a young festival has already made on the international photography stage. The application for Ballarat to join was proposed by BIFB board member Senga Peckham at the FOL directors meeting in Paris in November, and was considered along with applications by festivals from Luxembourg and Turin by the directors of 15 festivals which make up the FOL executive. The BIFB received a unanimous 15 votes for admission while Luxembourg was also accepted as a new member with 13 votes.

[From BALLARAT PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL JOINS WORLD GROUP @ free radical]

Read more

Way back in 2003 I wrote an article on the issue of film versus digital. Back then cameras, where prohibitively expensive, and digital storage was far more expensive than it is today. Photoshop of course, was the, mostly widely used application used to open and edit photographs on a computer, in some cases the only application. RAW files were yet to be part of the mainstream.

Raw files and new applications for sorting and editing photographs aside things haven't changed that much. Making a good image still requires a modicum of understanding about, lenses, light, at the minimum, making a print either digitally or via analogue requires it's own skill set, making a body of work, requires another skill-set, that has no bearing on technique or the ability to understand how your camera works. Making prints and using cameras are skills with a plethora of manuals [10,723 Results on Amazon today alone] available to anyone with enough interest in the medium to buy a handful of books and get access to the machinery to do this. Creating a body of work can often be done in isolation, or done in a more formal manner through training in a fine art degree program. Learning to 'pre-visualise in photography can be both learnt and taught, but is I feel the most difficult part of the process to really master.

Many of the points alluded to in the article above by Ken Rockwell, assume you have mastered the craft of photography, something that can be quite expensive to learn as a beginner in photography, and this is where digital shines over film, I feel. Making mistakes is the quickest and easiest way to learn the basics of exposure and composition. Making mistakes with film, on the other hand can cost a lot of time and wasted effort, if you haven't already mastered your camera craft. Finally the biggest issue I had with Mr Rockwell's article, was he seemed to sometimes refer to colour neg and other times colour slide, or positive film, two films with vastly different exposure latitudes, and some of his points were invalid if you used negative film as reading a colour neg over a light box, requires considerably more skill and knowledge than a slide film, which is simply a positive of the scene as taken.

So, here's a new table of the pros and cons of digital over film, based on my own experience of teaching camera craft, and using a variety of film cameras since the early 1980's, and digital cameras since the mid to late 1990's.

I do however agree that digitial has it's place in industries like catalogue photography fashion, and photo-journalism.

Pop in add your 2¢

From where I sit, there will be online publications such as cod magazine, who most likely will exist as pure online entities. Publicationss like, RMIT's second nature, will offer both online and hardcopy, as I will with several of my own future projects, I already have two e-books available for download.