Upload your best work from August (you keep the copyright). Help us judge the work. You’re guaranteed feedback, and if one of your photos is in the top 50 at the end of August, you’ll be in the first issue, online and in print. The top photo will be the cover.

Winner of the Leica Oskar Barnack Award Newcomer 2017 is Sergey Melnitchenko for his series „Behind the Scenes“. He receives 10,000 euros and a Leica M camera and lens.

Virtually no photographer has got as close to the dancers at a Chinese club as the Ukrainian Sergey Melnitchenko. He was with them backstage, offering rare insight into life in the cheap entertainment business. His own experience as a dancer served him well. With great sensitivity, the images reveal the reality of a tough profession despite its frolicsome appearance under the spotlight.

Following a search around the globe, across different photographic styles and subjects, we identified an eclectic mix of up-and-coming photographers. From a 15-year-old wildlife enthusiast, to a Venezuelan photojournalist, we’re proud to present this group of photographers as ones to watch. Scroll through to learn a little more about each of our ten Adobe Rising Stars, and follow along on the Lightroom Instagram to see more of their work over the next several weeks.

In cooperation with the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA), American Reportage is sponsoring six new student memberships to the NPPA.

The results of the 2017 National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest are now in, with grand-prize winner Sergio Tapiro Velasco set to receive a 10-day trip for two to the Galápagos Archipelago with National Geographic Expeditions, for his incredible shot of lightning striking the erupting Colima Volcano in Mexico. National Geographic was once more kind enough to allow me to share the winners and honorable mentions with you here, from three categories: Nature, Cities, and People. The photos and captions were written by the photographers, and lightly edited for style.

Néha Hirve, Luján Agusti and Gabriella Demczuk have each won a $2,500 grant from the inaugural Women Photograph + ONA Grants. The prize, the first from ONA’s Storytelling Fund, is dedicated to supporting new or in-progress projects from emerging female documentary photographers.

Johanna-Marie Fritz has been named the winner of the 2017 Inge Morath Award, the Magnum Foundation announced today. The award comes with a $5,000 production grant to support a long-term documentary project. Named after one of the first female members of Magnum, it’s awarded annually to a female photographer under 30. Past winners have included Jessica Dimmock, Danielle Villasana, Daniella Zalcman, Isadore Kosofsky, Lauren Pond and others. (You can find out more information about the award here.)

The winners of the the eighth annual Audubon Photography Awards competition have just been announced.  Photographers entered images in three categories: professional, amateur, and youth. More than 5,500 images depicting birdlife from 49 states and eight Canadian provinces, were judged. The National Audubon Society was once more kind enough to share some of this year’s winners and runners-up with us below. To view even more great bird photography, you can also see the top 100 entries at  the Audubon website.

He most recent artist book A Golden State has been included in the Candella Gallery permanent collection, Fleet Library Special Collections and will be released as a trade edition in 2018.

The Canon Female Photojournalist Award of €8000 (approx. $9000 U.S.) will be given to Catalina Martin-Chico to support her project about women members of Colombian guerilla group FARC. That work will be shown at Visa Pour L’Image in 2018. The award, which is sponsored by ELLE Magazine, honors women photographers for outstanding contributions to photojournalism. Previous winners of the award, which has been given annually since 2001, include Darcy Padilla, Mary F. Calvert, Brenda Ann Kenneally and Ami Vitale.

The Call for Entries for the 2017 W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund just ended for this year, and it happened on the same day the great Eugene Richards’ first museum retrospective and tour opened. The Eugenes, Smith and Richards, make for good company because they are both important photographic story tellers who shoot real people in desperate or, at least, trying circumstances.

Entrants in the fourth annual BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition, put on by the California Academy of Sciences, were invited to “celebrate and illustrate the rich diversity of life on Earth, and inspire action to protect and conserve it through the power of imagery.” These images originally appeared in the online magazine bioGraphic,  and they were kind enough to share some of the winners and finalists selected from nearly 6,000 entries.  bioGraphic is the official media sponsor for the competition. The captions were written by the bioGraphic editorial staff, and lightly edited for style.

Here is her advice about writing successful grant applications. Grant writing is hard, photography grants are competitive and, as Villasana notes, rejection is inevitable. But here she explain how you can turn the rejection of your grant application to your advantage

Girma Berta, Emmanuelle Andrianjafy, Georges Senga, Fethi Sahraoui and Lebohang Kganye are the winners of this year’s CAP Prize— the Contemporary African Photography Prize, awarded by the CAP Association

Johnny Miller received CENTER’s Project Launch Award from three significant jurors. His project, Unequal Scenes, looks at the separation of communities from the air for a profound look at the haves and have-nots. Christy Havranek, Photo Director for The Huffington Post Dewi Lewis, Publisher Dewi Lewis Publishing, and Mazie Harris, Assistant Curator, Department of Photographs, J. Paul Getty Museum, CA have selected Johnny’s project and all three of their juror statements follow.

A Portuguese photographer, Daniel Rodrigues — who only five years ago was unemployed and had to sell his gear to buy food and pay the rent — has been named Ibero-American Photographer of the Year in the fourth POY Latam contest. Santi Palacios of Spain was awarded second place and Andres Kudacki of Argentina took third.

Justyna Mielnikiewicz received the grant for 2016 to complete her project A Diverging Frontier, in which she looks at life in the former Soviet states, 25 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the role ethnicity plays in the political development of these countries.