The winners of our Patience is a virtue long exposure competition are...

It took some serious deliberation. There were a lot of emails between us. There was even the odd expletive. Finally, however, Haje, Tom, and I have selected our five favourite photos from the Photocritic Long Exposure Competition. In no particular order I present to you the winners of Patience is a Virtue:

Set Fire to the Rain by Cybjorg

Sunrise at Botany Bay, Edisto Island by Luke Robinson

Tower Bridge traffic by Nick Jackson

Blades of Light by Paul Shears

and Cairngorm Panorama by Ian Appleton

Many congratulations to the five of you! I shall be in contact presently to enable to you claim your Triggertrap gift card prizes!

We'd also like to say thank you to everyone who entered and made our lives a little bit tricky when it came to selecting a winner. As Haje said when we first sat down to draw up a shortlist of our favourites: 'There's some serious talent there!' Please do go look at the selection in the Flickr pool: there are some inspiring images.

Last call for the Photocritic long exposure competition!

British Summer Time ends this weekend&Mdash;at 02:00 on Sunday, to be exact—which means that time is running out for you to submit your long exposure photos to our competition. We won't be accepting any more entries after the clocks move back, so if you want to be in with a chance of winning a £40 gift card for the Triggertrap shop, you'd better get your skates on.

All of the competition's rules and regulations, not that there are many of them, can be found on the Flickr pool page, the same place to which you need to submit your entries. There've been some cracking shots submitted so far, but we'd really love to see more in the pool!

Good luck!

Patience is a virtue, but we're impatient to see your long exposure photos!

You've just under a week left to submit a maximum of five of your favourite long exposure photos to our competition, and be in with the chance of winning one of five £40 gift cards for the Triggertrap shop. We've already had some terrific entries over in our Flickr pool, but we'd love it if you made the judging even more difficult for us!

To enter, upload your image to Flickr and share it in our competition pool. There are some rules and regulations, you can find them on Flickr pool page or here on Photocritic.

We can't wait to see your photos!

Calls for entries! Care to pit yourself against the photographic opposition?

If you're brave enough to pit yourself against fellow photographers, the following competitions have made calls for entries recently. We try to feature only competitions that don't appear to attempt nasty rights grabs from their entrants, but please do read the terms and conditions carefully prior to entry.

Sony World Photography Awards 2015

With categories for professionals, amateurs, students, and young people, the Sony World Photography Awards have somewhere for any type of photographer to submit their images. Prizes include kit and cash, as well as a glitzy awards ceremony held in London.

• Professional – 15 categories judged on a series of work
• Open – 10 categories judged on a single image
• Youth – three categories for photographers under 20. Judged on a single image
• Student Focus – for higher education photography students aged 18-30

The Open and Youth competitions will close for entries at 23:59 GMT on Monday 5 January 2015. The Professional competition will close at 23:59 GMT on Thursday 8 January 2015.

Winner of the Open Category: Chen Li for his 'Rain in an Ancient Town' (Chen Li (China) Winner Open Travel 2014 Sony World Photography Awards)

All details and entry instructions can be found on the World Photography Organisation website.

Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year 2015

We're not overly keen on paid-for competitions here at Photocritic, but the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year competition has an excellent young people's competition that's free to enter. And we love encouraging kids and teens to get out with their cameras. Under 18s can enter three photos free of charge into their age category, they just have to be of food. The competition closes on 8 February 2015 at midnight GMT.

Philip Harben Award for Food in Action: Tessa Bunney (UK/PDR of Lao) - Noodle Making.

All details and entry instructions can be found on the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year website.

FXB 'Framing Hope' competition

The NGO FXB is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a photography competition. It is asking entrants to capture the concept of hope in one image. All entries will be displayed in an online gallery, with the five most-voted for by the public, shortlisted for judging by our expert panel who will select the overall winner.

The prize for the winning entry will be an exclusive half-day photography masterclass with photographer Jillian Edelstein and the opportunity to have her or his photograph exhibited alongside Edelstein’s at London’s gallery@oxo in August.

Hope in one frame?

Entries can be submitted until 25 July 2014 and submission details can be found on the competition website.

EyeEm announces its Photography Awards and Festival 2014

New kit. Maybe some cash. Global exhibition. Publication in a 'Best of 2014' photobook. A trip to Berlin. Sound good? They're all prizes that are up for grabs for winners of the EyeEm Global Photography Awards. Starting today, photo-sharing site EyeEm is looking for the best examples of mobile photography to showcase at the Berlin Holzmarkt as part of its photography festival in September this year. There are ten categories into each of which you can submit a maximum of three images.

Open now are the Portraitist, the Illusionist, and the Explorer categories. That round closes on 1 June, to be followed by the Architect, the Street Photographer, and the Illuminator categories, which are open to submissions from 2 June. The final round opens on 16 June and comprises categories the Speedster, the Landscapist, the Storyteller, and the Stylist.

All you have to do is upload your chosen images to EyeEm and tag them with the appropriate category in the Share screen. If you don't already have an EyeEm account, it's free to join.

The winners will be chosen by a jury of ten illuminaries from the photographic world, including Anna Dickson, the Huffington Post's Director of Photography, conflict photographer Benjamin Lowy, and Olivier Laurent, who edits TIME's Lightbox magazine. As well as being exhibited at Berlin's Holzmarkt as part of EyeEm's Photography Festival running 12-13 September, winning images will be showcased to the public in London, New York City, San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, and Tokyo. And the talented entrant named as the EyeEm Photographer of the Year will win a round-trip to Berlin for two, to experience the Festival!

'We’re looking forward to celebrating this new generation of budding photographers, who are defining a new era, with the launch of our Global Photography Festival & Awards,' says Florian Meissner, co-founder and CEO of EyeEm. 'Photography has changed significantly in recent years and at EyeEm we see smartphone photography as a natural evolution of the art form. The creative excellence of our community is the center of EyeEm and the Global Photography Festival & Awards are our way of continuing to support and show the world this incredible talent.'

The EyeEm Photography Festival runs over the 12 and 13 September 2014. It aims to highlight the creative images being made with mobile phones, connect leaders from the photography, devices, and media industry with the next generation of photographers to discuss the state and future of photography, and lay on photowalks, masterclasses, and portfolio reviews for attendees.

All of the details on how to enter the competition and how to book your place at the Festival are available on the EyeEm website. See you there?

400 images shortlisted for the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year competition

From over 6,000 entries, 400 potential winners have been selected for the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year competition and among them there's a welter of images from photographers aged under 17. Youngsters were able to enter their photos into three age categories—under 10, 11 to 14, and 15 to 17—and provided that they featured food, they were fair game for the competition. Now that the entries have been shortlisted, the judges, who include Yotam Ottolenghi and Jay Rayner, will whittle down their lists further. Overall winners can be selected to receive their awards on 23 April and be exhibited at the Mall Galleries in London between Thursday 24 and Sunday 27 April 2014.

Winners from the young people's categories will be presented with vouchers to put towards new camera kit!

You can take a look at all of the shortlisted young people's photos, together with the adult short-listed images, on the special Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year Shortlisted Gallery.

It's World Book Day so we're giving away books to celebrate!

Thanks for your entries, everyone! It was just a one-day give-away to celebrate World Book Day and we're now closed to submissions. In celebration of the marvellous World Book Day our lovely publishers the Ilex Press has offered up some free books for Photocritic readers. It even includes a pre-publication copy of my newest book Social Photography which isn't yet available in the shops. How rather awesome!

To enter our little giveaway, we want you to do one simple thing: tell us what book you're reading at the moment. It's probably easiest just to leave a comment here on Photocritic. But you can enter via Twitter if you prefer.

If you want to enter via Twitter, send a tweet to me (@SmallAperture), Haje (@Photocritic), or Ilex (@Ilex_Photo) and include the hashtags #WorldBookDay and #IlexGiveaway. (We'll need the hashtags to collate the entries, so don't forget them!)

Winners will be selected at random. I'll stick a pin in a list or something.

Anyway, to get the ball rolling, I'm currently reading Them: Adventures with Extremists by Jon Ronson. It's hilarious.

The ZSL Animal Photography Prize 2014 is now open!

The Zoological Society of London's Animal Photography Prize is now in its third year and open for entries. Seeing as you have to pay to submit your photos to the adult competition, we'll focus on the under-18s competition, which is free to enter. There are six categories and young photographers can enter one image into each. Each image needs to be different and they must relate clearly to the category into which they've been submitted. The categories are: The Perfect Moment, which rewards the patience needed to capture a stunning shot; Last Chance to See?, a focus on threatened habitats and endangered species; Weird & Wonderful looks for EDGE species, amazing adaptations, and unexpected surprises; Size Matters covers photos from the massive to the microscopic; The Birds and the Bees is for avians and invertebrates; and Deep & Meaningful is devoted to anything aquatic.

The judging panel includes television presenter Kate Humble and ornithologist Bill Oddie. The photographers of the images that they deem to be best in catoegory (one for each), will receive two complimentary tickets to the presentation ceremony and preview evening in London, a personalised certificate, and £250 in prize money.

The young person whose image is awarded the 'Judges Choice' for overall winner will receive a certificate and an additional £500 in prize money.

To be eligible to enter the young person's competition, you need to be under 18 years of age on the competition's closing date: 1 April 2014.

All of the details are on the ZSL website, and as always we advise you to check out the terms and conditions.

Share joy with #Flickr12Days

What does joy mean to you? The people over at Flickr would like to know. And in return for sharing your holiday images of joy, you could win up to £3,100. (Or US $5,000.)

From today, the 12 December, you can enter as many images as you have portraying festive joy to the #Flickr12Days competition. Every day the judging panel will look for one photo that's creative, original, and conveys the sense of the season. Out of the 12 daily winners, who'll each claim a £310 prize, a grand prize winner will also be selected. She or he will be awarded £3,100 and the the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing their image summarised holiday joy.

Entering isn't hard: you need to share your photo on Flickr, publicly, and it needs #Flickr12Days in its title. The Flickereenos have provided step-by-step instructions, too, and as always, please do check the terms and conditions to make sure you're not signing away your soul or similar. You'll find those here.

Get snapping, and enjoy!

A surreally good competition winner

It's been a little while coming, we know, but Haje and I have finally settled on the winner and runner-up for our surreal-inspired photo competition. It was a very close call between the two, but we're delighted to announce that the spoils go to: Phantom Lake, by They call me Alex.

and The Grind, by Hooker771

What appealed to us about both these photos was that neither relies on extensive manipulation. They're in-camera surreal creations. And they look terrific, in particular because of their gorgeous use of colour.

Congratulations both Hooker771 and They call me Alex!

The Ilex Press has very kindly provided a copy of my newest book, Surreal Photography: Creating the Impossible, for the winner. I hope that you enjoy it!

As an aside, that was the last competition that we'll be running for the forseeable future. It was a great deal of fun to dream up themes and watch you complete the briefs with such enthusiasm, but we thought that we'd quit while we're ahead. Thank you to anyone who ever entered and to those who generously provided prizes, too.