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.

Don’t forget to submit your best DC-area images to our 10th annual photo contest – the January 6 deadline will be upon us before you know it! Show us what you love about living in the metro area, and be part of our big celebration at The Historical Society of Washington, D.C. inside the fabulous Carnegie Library downtown in March.

• Want to follow in the footsteps of Ansel Adams and work for the Department of the Interior shooting large format (film) photos of National Parks? If you have the qualifications, this D.C.-based job opening should be right up your alley. Applications will be accepted until December 15.
• Saturday is your last chance to visit Artomatic 2015. Final night festivities include “Fire, Dance, Food, Art, Photo Booth and More!”
• Local photographer Keith Lane’s latest photo series from his recent travels to Iraq documents Peshmerga soldiers getting trained on how to find and destroy IEDs.
• The horrifying photo of the drowned Syrian toddler by Nilufer Demir made the top of the list at Columbia Journalism Review’s list of best journalism for 2015. “No other form [of journalism] can so poignantly illustrate human tragedy.”
• From a camerawoman tripping Syrian refugees to a hippo wandering the streets of Georgia, here’s a look at some of the stories behind Reuters’s selection of their top images of 2015.
• Darth Vader was bent on galactic domination, but his Ukrainian namesake enjoys more mundane pursuits – local politics, walking the family dog, and embroidery.
• Jennifer Greenburg perfectly adds herself to other people’s old photos. WIRED covered it, too. Be sure to read her amusing captions at the very bottom of each image.
• Azuma Makoto’s botanical sculptures may look pretty and delicate, but they’re tough. They’ve braved desert sandstorms, swum among glaciers, and even floated above the Earth at nearly 100,000 feet.
• Elliot Ross spent a year with wheat farmers in the high plains of Colorado – and uncovered a remarkable, and often terrifying, world.
• By the end of this great list and incredible gallery, you’ll be convinced to try your hand at wildlife photography too.
• Photographer Dave Sandford captures the wild waves of Lake Erie in this incredible series.
• A photojournalist’s discovery that his father was among thousands of Japanese-Americans confined to internment camps during World War II led him to seek out survivors who had been photographed by Dorothea Lange.
• Some urban trees won’t be hemmed in by walls, pavements or concrete, their roots slowly working their way into the very structure of the city.
• Jonathan Browning’s images of trainee hairdressers and beauticians at Wenfeng’s headquarters and boarding college in Shanghai, China.
• An orangutan at the Barcelona zoo watches a visitor perform a magic trick and finds it hilarious. [Video]

Our 10th annual photo contest is now open! Get your photos in that show us what you love about living in the metro area, and be part of our huge celebration at The Historical Society of Washington, D.C. inside the Carnegie Library next March. (By the way, they have their own contest going on right now — submit here to For the Record.)

• Photographer Hantim Lee wraps up 15 years of taking portraits of customers through the glass in her parent’s liquor store in Washington, D.C.
• Make a donation to Critical Exposure, which teaches students to use photography to advocate for change in their schools and communities.
• Want to be one of 25 lucky Instagrammers to see Bei Bei in person on December 19? Register by December 7 for the National Zoo’s #PandaStory Instameet contest.
• Vanity Fair profiles William Eggleston, the “father of color photography.”
• When your friends name their baby Lux, just grit your teeth and smile and nod.
• TIME has selected Angelos Tzortzinis as Best Wire Photographer of 2015 for his heartfelt work documenting Greece’s economic and refugee crises.
• Revolution and terrorism have all but destroyed Tunisian tourism and the thriving film industry that helped produce three of the six Star Wars films. Locals who once worked as film crew live alongside the old sets, which now lie neglected, slowly being consumed by the desert.
• Tears produced through different causes — grief, sadness, irritation — have different structures, as photographer Rose Lynn-Fisher shows us.
• A new exhibition in Paris — “Who is afraid of Women Photographers?” — reveals over a century’s worth of stones unturned, of women who in one way or another have been forgotten by history despite their lasting influence on the art and practice of photography.
• Dickey Chapelle, one of the first female war photographers, risked her life to capture history on world stages from Iwo Jima to the Vietnam War.
• FarmHer was founded in 2013 to begin to change the image of agriculture – to include women in that image through photographs and stories.
• Best known for capturing the Great Depression in the 1930s, Walker Evans photographed American life for nearly 70 years. “Depth of Field” is the most comprehensive study of his work ever published, covering his early shots of New York and his lesser-known Polaroids.
• Forget Mickey Mantle and Jose Conseco: Collect photographer cards instead!
• Freelancers are pissed about Time Magazine’s new photographer contracts.
• Send your rock ‘n roll photos to the Smithsonian, which will be selected from to publish in a new book with both crowdsourced and professional images.
• After six years and 720,000 exposures, photographer Alan McFayden got the bird shot he’d been waiting for.
• After two years of controversy over images submitted to the World Press Photo contest, the organization has announced major changes to the competition’s rules.
• In such a competitive environment, what can make or break a wildlife photo contest entry? Judges agree there is no single formula, but there are some key things to consider.
• What’s your perfect childhood Christmastime memory? Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi fondly remembers loud, drunk bears singing and dancing in her grandparents’ living room in Romania.
• Using camera traps, ecologist Jonny Armstrong photographs animals when they least expect it.