PPA Today

PPA Charities Golf Tournament

Join fellow PPA photographers and exhibitors at the first annual PPA Charities Golf Tournament. We will be playing at the ASU Karsten Golf Course in Tempe on Saturday, January 10, 2009, with an 8:00am Shotgun Start. Your $150 registration fee (or $550 for a foursome) will include:

• Golf fee and car fees
• Practice balls before your event
• Official scoring by professional staff
• Sun Devil Patio Awards BBQ Awards Luncheon following golf
• Prizes, goodie bag of gifts from PPA vendors, and much more.

Download this registration form to sign up now.

Create a smile: Family Portrait Month

October is PPA Charities' Family Portrait Month

A smile is universal in meaning...and it's pretty contagious! But what about  children who cannot smile? Those who find it difficult to even speak or eat?  Now's your chance to give them a smile.

Participate in Family Portrait Month, a national fund-raising effort in  October to benefit Operation Smile, a worldwide children's medical charity  dedicated to improving the health and lives of children born with cleft lips,  cleft palates, and other facial deformities.

It's easy. Pledge to contribute a portion of each October Family Portrait  Month sale to PPA  Charities, which has chosen Operation Smile as its charitable partner. Just sign up online and make the small $25 donation, and you're on your way to making  a difference.

Studio Management Services (SMS) 3-Day Business Workshop

Want to DOUBLE or TRIPLE your sales and net income?
Register now and attend the class that can show you how.

Studio Management Services’ (SMS) client studios have experienced that kind of success. Now you can, too. Attend the last 3-day SMS workshop of the year—November 10-12 in Atlanta, Georgia—and walk away with business methods you need to pave the same path to success.

SMS mentors have helped hundreds of studios just like yours. Register now. It could be the single most important business decision you make this year.

The 3-day workshop is geared toward studios that have already acheived the $50k gross sales benchmark. All SMS workshops cover:

• Pricing for profit
• Managerial accounting
• Sales techniques
• Branding
• and much more…all from some of the best-known instructors in this business

For complete details on this SMS seminar, visit ppa.com/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=688.

OurPPA.com Forums: Update your profile

Add your member number to your OurPPA.com user profile by August 23

We are upgrading our forum software on OurPPA.com and working to more tightly integrate it with PPA.com. If you are a PPA member and a member of our discussion forums on OurPPA.com, you can help us out by updating your user profile. All you have to do is login to OurPPA.com, click the User CP link and then add your PPA member number into the appropriate profile field. You can find your membership number on your membership id card. Your assistance is appreciated.

Tamron Educational Purchase Rebate Program 2008

TAMRON Announces new educational purchase rebate program for students majoring in photography and other communications programs. New Program Now Allows Tamron Dealers to Deliver Lenses Purchased by Qualifying Students and Educators on Same Day of Purchase

Instructors & Students employed by or enrolled in select U.S. universities and community colleges and teaching or majoring in photography, photojournalism, visual media, fine art, design, film, video, or communications are eligible for significant rebates on Tamron products. The Educational Purchase Rebate CAN be combined with any regular Tamron rebate in effect at the time of your purchase. Click here for details.

PPA's August Webinar Schedule

We have three great webinars in August, including a FREE member-only program on Wednesday, August 27—Protect Yourself: Copyright, Trademarks, and Model Releases—with staff from PPA's Copyright and Government Affairs office. Also joining us this month are Sarah Petty and Lori Nordstrom, presenting Hidden Power of Charitable Marketing next Wednesday, August 13, and Chris Wunder with Earn $1,000 an Hour from School Photography, Step 1: Underclass Business Basics on Monday, August 25.

International Print Competition--The Results Are In!

Download the list of accepted prints from this year's International Print Competition. There are two versions of the list, one sorted by last name and the other sorted by Country/State. Congratulations to everyone who merited at this year's competition. We are looking forward to seeing your images on display at Imaging USA in Phoenix this January.

A Different Kind of School

This Evergreen Affiliate School Workshop takes the classroom to the beach!  Sail into the heart of the beautiful San Juan Islands of Washington with Gabriel Alonso, M.Photog.Cr., aboard the 65' sailboat "Shawmanee." Not only do you get to spend the week in a wonderful beach house, you also get new opportunities each day to master outdoor portrait lighting in a variety of challenging situations. And along with Gabriel’s tutelage, you’ll take part in a special one-day program with Don MacGregor, M.Photog.Cr. API. Don will demonstrate group compositions, and you can watch as he creates a portrait of Gabriel and Amy Alonso on the beach.

The landscapes surrounding you all week will amaze and inspire you. This is an Affiliate School week not to be missed and certainly never forgotten. Better contact Sam now…there may still be a few spots open in the beach house!

August 17 – 21, 2008
San Juan Islands, WA
Contact: Sam Gardner; [email protected]
Web site: www.ppw.org

2008 Adobe Design Achievement Awards

Help Adobe honor the best interactive, motion and video, and traditional media work created by the most talented and promising students from around the world.

When
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Doors open at 6:00 PM for a gallery preview
Award ceremony at 7:30 PM
Creative formal attire

Where
Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
New York University
566 LaGuardia Place
New York, NY 10012 (Find a map here)

RSVP
RSVP online now and reserve your place at the 2008 ADAA ceremony.

ADAA Live!
Check out the online gallery and see the 2008 semifinalists as well as past ADAA winners and finalists.

What happens when your SD card fails?

ESS Data Recovery overviews the data recovery process for flash medium.

Most photographers by now are using some form of flash medium. Tagged as more reliable and efficient, flash memory is a sensible solution for professional photographers.  Being at the forefront of storage technology, many PPA members are taking full advantage of compact flash, SD and “thumbdrive” devices.

But what do you do when that SD card fails?

“Like anything else electronic, flash media will eventually go down,” says ESS Data Recovery President Ben Carmitchel “Whether due to a static charge from your pocket or a dunk in your morning cup of coffee, that flash card will eventually stop functioning normally”.  ESS Data Recovery sees between 120 to nearly 300 flash drives per month.  For data recovery experts, who typically deal with magnetic medium such as hard drives, a new set of data recovery problems have arisen—while flash drives may be more reliable than hard drives, the data recovery procedures used are completely different.