Have you entered our annual photo contest yet? You have until January 11 to submit your images that show the life and culture of Washington, D.C. and the metro area. We’ll be announcing more exciting details about this year’s show soon—make sure you’re a part of it! And now on to Friday Links:

• Capital Weather Gang shared their 5 favorite weather photos from last year.
• Scroll back to all those garden beauty shots you took last spring and enter them into Washington Gardener Magazine’s 12th annual photo contest before January 22.
• Sign your high schooler up for Photography for Teens at The Art League, an eight-session class starting January 21.
• Aerial photographer Mark Holtzman talked to the Atlantic about how he took this photo of a B-2 stealth bomber over the Rose Bowl.
• Pacific Standard features Anthony Carbajal, a 28-year-old with ALS who decided to use his photography skills to find hope.
• Go see the finalists of the Air & Space / Smithsonian photo contest and vote for your favorite to get a Readers’ Choice prize before January 14.
• Photography exhibition documents the immigrant experience from the 1860s through 2015. On view at Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York until Jan. 27.
• Senior writer for Adorama Learning Center shares five digital photography technology predictions for 2018.
• From 1893 to 1897, Carl Størmer used a hidden camera to photograph life in Oslo, Norway while attending university.

Take some of your holiday time off to enter our 12th annual photo contest. Show us what you love about living in the D.C. area. And now, enjoy our last Friday Links of the year. See you in 2018!

• Every publication is pushing out their end-of-year lists, so get your fill of 2017’s best photography at the Washington Post, the New York Times, The Atlantic, the New Yorker, TIME magazine, and Getty photographers.
• Annie Leibovitz is offering her first-ever online photography course.
• The Museum of Selfies opens in Los Angeles this January, but at least the organizers seem to have a sense of humor about it.
• Engineers at Dartmouth claim to have made a breakthrough in imaging sensor technology for high-quality, low-light photography.
• The late actor Anton Yelchin turned out to be quite the secret photographer. See his work in W Magazine or in a new exhibit in Chelsea through January 20.
• In Houston Aristocracy v. Instagrammers, the score is currently 0-1.
• ICYMI: This look into the life of renowned art bookmaker Gerhard Steidl from May made Longreads’ best profiles of the year list. Steidl “summons the world’s most influential artists and photographers to his workshop for days of emotional terrorism in service of books that are, in the words of photographer Edward Burtynsky, ‘the haute couture of printing.’ Depending on how you read [the profile], it’s an artistic fairy tale, a psychological horror movie, or some kind of thrilling fusion of the two.”

Our annual photo contest is open! You don’t want to miss this chance to be part of our celebration of life in D.C. with our spring exhibit. This is our 12th year, so get ready for some surprises. Find all the information here, and show us your best shots.

• Today, Glen Echo Photoworks Gallery opens its third annual exhibit from their regular Coffee & Critique members. Join them for a reception this Sunday, 4 to 6 p.m. They’re also offering holiday portraits with your family this Saturday for a donation to the gallery.
• Berlin-based photography team Billy and Hells created the emotional portraits that accompany Time magazine’s Person of the Year issue, featuring “The Silence Breakers” who spoke out about sexual harassment this year.
• Los Angeles Times staff photographer Marcus Yam captured the devastation of the Southern California wildfires this week in one iconic image.
• Let’s get the end-of-year lists started with The Atlantic’s top 25 news photos of 2017.
• Photographer Amy Davis shows how Baltimore’s theaters have changed over the decades.
• Norwich University of the Arts looks to reinvent the traditional photography degree with a focus on individuality and creating a visual voice.
• Photographer provides rural Cambodian villagers with first portraits of themselves through the charity, My First Selfie.
• Émile Zola, best known as an author, also spent the last eight years of his life obsessed with photography and was taking his own selfies back around 1900.

Join us for our November happy hour at Free State next Thursday, 6 p.m. Photographers and friends all welcome, and perhaps you’ll be able to tell us about some good exhibits you’ve seen recently because…

• FotoweekDC kicks off tonight! Head to the opening party and see the contest winners at FotoWeek Central, then search their calendar by location or daily events for more exhibits, discussions, workshops, photo walks, and parties than you could possibly cram into just one week.
• Go support two local photographers, Jessica Del Vecchio and Chris Williams, with their annual Art for Turkeys fundraiser: You’ll get six small photography prints for a donation of $32 or more to Bread for the City to provide holiday dinners.
• “Dereliction” by photographer Cedric Williams opens at BlackRock Center for the Arts in Germantown on November 11 with a reception from 2 to 4 p.m.
• The New York Times is in D.C. next week to hold a discussion with some of their Pulitzer-winning photojournalists at the Dupont Underground. Thursday, Nov. 16, 7:30 p.m. $15-20.
• Enter the international Wiki Science photography competition by the end of November. The U.S. part of the contest is being organized by Wikimedia District of Columbia.
• Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards aim to raise awareness about wildlife conservation efforts if you can stop laughing long enough first.
• Conservation photographers, filmmakers, scientists, and more will be meeting in D.C. on Nov. 14 and 15 at WildSpeak, a symposium to explore how visual media can contribute to impactful science communications and conservation efforts.
• “The vultures were so charming,” says photographer Traer Scott, who visited owls, kestrels, and other birds in rehabilitation centers for her new book, Raptors: Portraits of Birds of Prey.
• This probably isn’t news to our readers, but Pete Souza’s latest book, Obama: An Intimate Portrait, with an introduction by the President himself, was released this week. You’ll have to cruise Craigslist for tickets to Souza’s sold out talk at Sixth & I next Monday.

• The Washington Post Magazine has a photo essay exploring the four quadrants of D.C. and changes taking place across the city.
• Head to Glen Echo Park for the 2017 Photoslam Exhibit, featuring among others two Exposed alums: Tom Mullins and Denzil Spicer. A reception and gallery talk is this Saturday, 5 to 7 p.m.
• Submit your work to IGDC’s first community exhibit, featuring “the best sides of the DMV,” by October 30.
• Errol Morris reviews a new photobook by Peter Manseau that looks back at the “beginnings of photography and its deceptions” in The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost.
• Photobucket shocked its users last week by holding their photos hostage until they paid hundreds of dollars for a new hosting fee.
• Terry Richardson, the Harvey Weinstein of the photography business, is out.
• The FAA is recommending cameras (and any electronics bigger than a smartphone) be banned from checked luggage on airplanes due to lithium-ion battery fires.
• Lensrentals released data about what equipment photographers have been renting in 2017.
• Hisakata Hiroyuki’s action shots make these cats look like they practice martial arts.