Strictly Come Dancing stars James and Ola Jordan will be making a special appearance at Olympus’s stand at next month’s Focus On Imaging show.

The pair will be on hand to help celebrate the unveiling of the much-discussed Olympus OM-D range.

The pair will be putting on several performances and taking part in a Q and A as part of Olympus’s programme at the four-day photography event.

The Olympus stand will also host a number of talks from pro photographers, as well as discussions with Olympus experts to hear their thoughts on the new OM-D range.

Dubbed the ‘Pure View’ camera, Nokia has given a hint of what its new smartphone is capable of in the 22-second video below.

The video shows high-quality images of snowy scenes and flashes text reading ‘Pure Depth’, ‘Pure Definition’ and ‘Pure Detail’, ending with the date February 27, 2012.

This date is the first day of the Mobile World Congress 2012 in Barcelona.

Via SlashGear

The landmark V1 (along with its younger sibling, the J1) marks Nikon’s first foray into the compact system camera market. Designed for the mobile photographer, its fast performance, advanced features and newly designed interchangeable lens system will help you take creative images of the highest quality wherever you go.

How to Win a Nikon V1 kit

For a chance at winning a fabulous new Nikon V1 + 10-30mm lens kit all you have to do is visit us at the Focus On Imaging show.

Come by the Digital Camera stand at E42 and say hello. We’ll scan your entry badge, and your name will go into a draw. It’s that simple!

Focus On Imaging runs from 4 to 7 March at the Birmingham National Exhibition Centre. Come by and say hello on any of those days and we’ll enter you into the draw.

On 30 March we will draw a name at random, and this lucky person will win the Nikon V1 kit. Once the winner is notified, we will post an announcement on our website.

The winner will also be profiled in the next issue of our sister title, N-Photo, the magazine dedicated solely to Nikon photographers, following the 30 March draw, as well as on our websites.

For more information on the Focus show, visit the Focus On Imaging website.

For full competition terms and conditions, visit the Future Publishing website.

Image copyright Mark Smith

British wildlife photographers have a chance to win a cash prize of £5,000 and their work showcased in a national touring photography exhibition as the British Wildlife Photography Awards 2012 kick off.

With an overall prize fund worth £20,000, entries have now opened for the 2012 competition. Winners and commended entrants will have their work showcased in a national touring exhibition, as well as reproduced in a book published by AA Publishing.

The Awards’ 12 categories include Animal Portraits, Animal Behaviour, Urban Wildlife, Hidden Britain, Coast and Marine, Wild Woods, Wildlife in my Backyard, Habitat, Living Landscape, British Seasons, Documentary Series and Wildlife in HD Video.

Images may be entered by purchasing ‘credits’, which cost £5 each. Entry of a single image costs 2 credits, while 3 credits lets you enter up to 5 images and 4 credits up to 10 pictures. For a full breakdown of the fee structure visit the BWPA competitions website.

Now in its fourth year, the British Wildlife Photography Awards were established to recognise the talents of wildlife photographers of all nationalities practising in Britain, whilst at the same time highlighting the great wealth and diversity of Britain’s natural history.

A lot of cool images and fun technique ideas pass through our inboxes, but rarely do they come with such punning potential.

If you think the annual pancake toss is flipping boring, why not avoid all the usual crepe and try a new photography technique that starts in your kitchen and ends looking through your wideangle pancake lens.

Lyle’s Golden Syrup has come up with a new way for photographers to celebrate Pancake Day by creating a new series of edible three-dimensional ‘panscapes’ that turn the humble pancake into an edible art form that you can make easily at home.

Food experts Polly Betton and Andrew Stellitano have built a series of 3D landscapes using the humble pancake as their basis, creating terrains ranging from desert islands and volcanoes to icebergs and forests, which were then photographed by food photographer Dominic Davies, who shot the images for chef Heston Blumenthal’s The Big Fat Duck Cookbook.

The ‘panscapes’ were all created using common household cupboard ingredients such as pancake mix, packets of meringues, cocktails sticks and Lyle’s Golden Syrup, which sponsored the project.

Below, watch Andrew make a forest ‘panscape’:

So get out your aprons and digital cameras and get to work! If you’ve made a panscape yourself, we’d love to see it!

And if you want to see more from Andrew, visit the We Love Baking Facebook page.

1/8000sec at f/4, ISO 800, Auto White Balance

Canon has posted a series of sample EOS-1D X photos in a special gallery on its website, which are available for download.

The six images include four sports photos and two portraits, shot at ISO 800 or higher to show off the EOS-1D X’s low-light capability. We’ve downloaded a selection of the Canon 1D X photos and provided 100% crops below to give you an indication of how the new Canon DSLR performs at higher ISOs.

1/6400sec at f/4, ISO 800, Auto White Balance

The photo above shown at 100%.

1/640sec at f/5.6, ISO 1600, Auto White Balance

The image above at 100%.

1/8000sec at f/4, ISO 800, Auto White Balance

The image above at 100%.

Canon has also provided a sample EOS-1D X movie called ‘Heart Beat’ which shows off the new Canon DSLR’s video recording capability.

To view all the images, visit the Canon EOS-1D X website.

Or you can read the Canon EOS-1D X hands-on review at our sister website, TechRadar.

The OM-D is available from April 2012 as a kit with the M.ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 12-50mm 1:3.5-6.3 for £1149.99. The Olympus OM-D body-only price to be confirmed.

Samuel Aranda/Corbis Images/World Press Photo

The votes are in, and the World Press Photo of the Year 2011 award goes to Samuel Aranda from Spain.

Aranda, who was on assignment for The New York Times in Yemen, shot his image of a woman holding a wounded relative in her arms during clashes in Sanaa, Yemen, on 15 October 2011. The woman was inside a mosque being used as a field hospital by demonstrators who were clashing against the rule of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Some 5,247 photographers from 124 countries entered the World Press Photo 2011 competition, now in its 55th year, submitting a staggering 101,254 pictures by the mid-January deadline.

The World Press Photo 2011 jury gave prizes in nine themed categories to 57 photographers of 24 nationalities, hailing from Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the USA.

Jury member Koyo Kouoh said of Aranda’s picture: “It is a photo that speaks for the entire region. It stands for Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, for all that happened in the Arab Spring. But it shows a private, intimate side of what went on. And it shows the role that women played, not only as care-givers, but as active people in the movement.”

Fellow World Press Photo 2011 jury member Aidan Sullivan added: “The winning photo shows a poignant, compassionate moment, the human consequence of an enormous event, an event that is still going on. We might never know who this woman is, cradling an injured relative, but together they become a living image of the courage of ordinary people that helped create an important chapter in the history of the Middle East.”

The judging is conducted at the World Press Photo office, where all entries are presented anonymously to the jury, who discuss and debates their merits over a period of two weeks. The jury operates independently of the World Press Photo organisation.

The World Press Photo contest is open to professional press photographers, photojournalists and documentary photographers.

Its design based on Olympus’s classic OM series, the 16.1-megapixel OM-D – not to be confused with OMD – is housed in a dust- and splash-proof magnesium alloy body and boasts what Olympus claims are several world firsts.

Most notably, the Olympus OM-D offers photographers the world’s fastest autofocus of any interchangeable lens camera, Olympus says, a claim that even includes all DSLRs. The company’s Frequency Acceleration Sensor Technology (FAST) AF, the same system used in the latest Olympus PEN cameras launched last summer, only the FAST AF system has been enhanced in the Olympus OM-D to make it even… FASTER.

The OM-D’s other big claim is the world’s first 5-axis image stabilisation system, which attacks blur on five fronts by making adjustments for horizontal and vertical shift and rolling, as well as yaw and pitch movement. The Olympus E-P3, for instance, adjusts for blur only on two axes.

Finally, the OM-D features an EVF, which offers a 100% field of view and uses a Creative Control interface that uses a tone curve overlay to enable accurate adjustment of highlight and shadow brightness.

Also on board are a 3in OLED touchscreen that tils from 80 degrees upwards to 50 degrees downwards, along with a host of creative art filters, an ISO range from 200 – 25,600 and full HD video capability.

Photographers are expected to be able to get their hands on Olympus OM-D cameras in the shops by around early April 2012.

For more details on this new Olympus camera, see the hands-on Olympus OM-D review at our sister website, TechRadar.

First up, the new EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L II USM lens is added to Canon’s professional line and is an upgrade to the previous standard zoom lens.

It features a redesigned optical system which includes two Ultra-low Dispersion (UD) and one Super UD aspheric element which is designed to minimise chromatic aberration and colour blurring.

Super Spectra coatings to reduce ghosting and flare have also been included, along with a fluorine coating to minimise the amount of dust, dirt and fingerprints.

A ring-type Ultrasonic Motor (USM) works in combination with a high-performance CPU for quick and accurate, and silent autofocus. The lens has a minimum focusing distance of 0.38m at all focal lengths throughout the zoom range.

The structure of the lens has been improved to offer enhanced zoom durability along with grater shake and shock resistance within the barrel. The size of the lens has also been reduced by 10mm.

A new zoom lock lever means that photographers can lock the zoom position at the extreme wide end of the lens to prevent damage to the lens in transit, while it is also water and dustproof.

Read more about the new Canon EF lenses, on our sister website, TechRadar.