Congrats again to all of the winners of our 10th annual photo contest! We are busy planning the best party we can possibly throw you on March 10 and hope all of you will join us. Let’s get to the links:

• Hop on it: Staff photographer positions don’t open very often these days. Washingtonian Magazine wants YOU.
• The Washington Post has a special feature about D.C photographer Chris Earnshaw, and his Polaroids of the devastated city in the 1970s.
• The New York Times Lens blog published a two-part story with new research on the life of Vivian Maier.
• David Bowie died this week at 69; Al Jazeera America has one of the better photo galleries from his life. Made all the more sad because AJA shuttered its entire division this week, laying off hundreds. The Guardian, meanwhile, covers Alan Rickman’s life in pictures. RIP, you brilliant men.
• “If you were there when the Hindenburg caught on fire, and you took a picture of it, that’s a great photograph. But you’re not a great photographer, because you can’t repeat that in everyday things. What a great photographer does is, they are consistently able to make something in a style that’s personal to themselves.” PBS talks to photographer Ken Van Sickle about what makes a photographer now that everyone can take pictures.
• An Instagram “power user” took a video of what his notifications look like (when he has them on).
• Photo editor Elizabeth Krist is retiring after 21 years and editing over four million photos at National Geographic. See her top ten favorite stories from over the years.
• In the upcoming publication “Notes for an Epilogue,” Tamas Dezso photographs the vanishing world of old Romania.
• Scroll down the list of finalists for the annual American Society of Magazine Editors awards to see the Feature Photography picks in The California Sunday Magazine, Politico, New York, Vanity Fair, and W.
• Gloria is cute as hell and probably does more on three legs than you do on two. You can adopt her from the Washington Humane Society, Georgia Avenue location.

A massive thank you to everyone who entered our 10th annual contest – we received a record number of submissions this year! Look for the winners announcement on Wednesday at noon. Until then, feel free to hum the Jeopardy theme to yourself and sink your teeth into this week’s appetizing assortment of links.

• Celebrate 35 years of the 9:30 Club with this awesome photobook featuring images by lots of familiar local names, including Exposed DC alum Kyle Gustafson, who has two photos on the cover. Kyle recently posted his best concert photos from 2015.
• Attention urban gardeners: Washington Gardener magazine’s 2016 photo contest is open through January 22.
• How have the “Photography Encouraged” signs at the Renwick affected visitors’ experience with the art?
• A local Houston news station started a photo gallery of the fog covering the city this morning.
• WV Public Radio’s Inside Appalachia discusses what happens to a community when outsiders come into Appalachia and take photos of people there.
• The editors of Slate’s Behold photo blog highlight “the five best photo stories you might have missed this year.”
• The Humble Arts Foundation susses out the most popular photobooks in 2015 from 42 “best of” lists.
• To commemorate its 50th anniversary, the Kamoinge Workshop has published has published “Timeless: Photographs by Kamoinge,” a survey of its evolving and wide-ranging work and an important contribution to the history of photography.
• The Financial Times published a special issue on science and photography.
• The cryophile winter swimmers club is based in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk and Reuters photographer Ilya Naymushin spent time with some of its intrepid members as they took their icy swim in the Yenisei river.
• Polish photographer Zofia Rydet knocked on 20,000 doors over two decades to find out how her fellow citizens lived.
• It was dangerous for anyone to capture life in Chile under Pinochet – let alone a woman determined to show society’s underbelly. Paz Errázuriz’s photographs of outcasts, fighters and circus performers are both haunting and fascinating. (NSFW)
• A beautiful portrait of the small city of Saint-Louis, which once stood as the capital of Senegal and Mauritania for nearly 100 years, and is one of the oldest colonial cities on the continent.
• Starlings from Russia and eastern Europe winter in Israel, swooping, pivoting and soaring, putting on a display to shame any aerobatics team.
• A selection of photographer Joel Sartore’s stunning portraits of monkeys, taken from his ambitious, decade-long Photo Ark project documenting endangered species.

Here’s your last edition of Friday Links for 2015. At Exposed DC, we’ve spent a wonderful year enjoying the images from so many talented photographers living in the D.C. area. We threw a big party at the new Capital Fringe headquarters last March for our 9th annual Exposed DC Photography Show, met up to watch the once-in-a-lifetime flyover of World War II aircraft, worked with some generous volunteer teachers who taught many of you some new skills at our Knowledge Commons DC photography class series, and have gotten to know tons of you through our monthly happy hours. We look forward to 2016 and celebrating our 10th anniversary exhibit with you all — submit your photos by January 6 to have your work featured in the exhibit — and doing whatever we can to foster and encourage local photographers.

• The City Paper’s Louis Jacobson picks his top nine photographic images (plus one video project) exhibited in the D.C. area in 2015.
• National Geographic revealed the winners of their 2015 photo contest, with the grand prize going to James Smart for his shot “Dirt” which shows an anti-cyclonic tornado touching down in open farmland in Colorado.
• Aperture looks back at a selection of their 2015 features, from in-depth conversations with William Klein and Miyako Ishiuchi to a secret history of Japanese photography.
• A collection of some of the best books of photography from this year, as selected by Teju Cole and editors of The New York Times magazine.
• “Each photograph selected for TIME’s Top 10 photos of 2015, carefully culled from thousands and presented here unranked, reflects a unique and powerful point of view that represents the best of photojournalism this year.”
• The Guardian takes a closer look at five fake photos that went viral in 2015.
• “Trees and bees confused in Washington, D.C.” Capital Weather Gang’s Kevin Ambrose headed for the Mall to document the effects of the recent spring-like weather.
• SFGate has a photo gallery of this elephant seal determined to cross North Bay Highway in California. She DGAF.
• Quit taking images of beautiful sunsets. You’re better off looking for the bizarre. Scientists have uncovered exactly what makes a photo memorable.
• A Siberian tiger and a goat that was supposed to be his lunch became best friends instead.
• Fans of Vladimir Putin can now spend “the whole year with the Russian president” as a new 2016 limited edition calendar is released in Russia. Make sure not to miss November’s photo, captioned “Dogs and I have very warm feelings for one another.”
• Behind the Lens: 2015 Year in Photographs. By Pete Souza, Chief Official White House Photographer. Make sure you’re sitting comfortably and have time to spare before feasting your eyes on this post which features over 100 incredible images.
• “The National Zoo’s small mammal house features an eclectic collection of wacky hairstyles and odd visages.” Stunning photographs by habitual Exposed DC alumna Angela Napili.

With the long weekend ahead of us, we’ve got a special Wednesday edition of Friday Links for you. Meanwhile, if you’ve put together a highlight reel of your work from 2015, don’t forget to let us know and we’ll link to it through the end of the year. And while you’re at it, take the opportunity to enter the 10th annual Exposed DC photography contest!

• Meet some of the newest babies born in 2015 at the National Zoo and Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute.
• National Geographic points out that 2015 was a big year for photos and videos of animals riding other animals.
• The Hollywood Reporter says that the rest of the Star Wars franchise will be shot on Kodak film, in a trend that’s moving back towards film recording. Kodak closed its last motion picture lab last year, but is expanding its capabilities with other labs to fulfill the requests.
• Behind the scenes at The Nutcracker. Photographer Grigory Dukor documented Nacho Duato’s production of the Christmas classic at the Mikhailovsky Theatre in St Petersburg, Russia.
• Belgian photographer Pascal Mannaerts has captured a series of images of the Tsaatan people, a Mongolian tribe who depend entirely on reindeer.
• Norman Rockwell created paintings that defined a generation, but the photographs that helped make them are just as fascinating.
• Yener Torun’s Instagram feed of photographs of minimalist buildings around Istanbul is phenomenal.
• A professor at Texas A&M University posted this series of photos to Facebook. “There has been a dead cockroach in the Anthropology building’s stairwell for at least two weeks. Some enterprising person has now made her a little shrine.”
• Shōji Ueda was known as a “sedentary adventurer,” spending much of his life shooting the sand dunes right by his house. But when the Japanese master photographer died, 5,000 unseen pictures came to light in what the Guardian calls “the most beautiful, surprising photobook of the year.”
• For 20 years, Thomas Alleman kept, but never opened, a box filled with negatives. They documented the eight years Alleman spent photographing his family between the ages of 24 and 32, centered around the deterioration of his mother’s health.
• “At first glance, the indigenous Bolivian women don’t look much like mountain climbers, with their colorful, multilayered skirts and fringed shawls.” A photo essay on Bolivian cholita mountain climbers by AP photographer Juan Karita.
• The Guardian has chosen Yannis Behrakis of Reuters as their agency photographer of the year. They share what they describe as “the most astonishing moments he captured in two of the biggest stories of 2015 – the refugee crisis and the financial implosion in his home country Greece.”
• Many of Satoki Nagata’s images might seem to be multiple exposures or to have been manipulated in post-production, but all are single exposures of Chicago’s nighttime.
• “The Cat Photographer” totally earned his title. For the past 70 years, 95-year-old Walter Chandoha has made a career out of photographing cats for both editorial and commercial purposes.
• An insanely cute baby sea otter was born unexpectedly at Monterey Bay Aquarium tide pool.