Canon & SportsShooter.com Clip Contest Closing In On Winner

The annual honor - which will be announced online on February 1, 2004 - rewards the top aggregate point scorer in the site's monthly "clip competition" with Canon's rugged, rapid and ready for anything EOS 1D professional digital SLR. Capable of capturing 8 frames per second, the EOS 1D digital SLR is the camera of choice for photojournalists of every specialty. In addition to the EOS 1D digital camera annual prize, Canon created the SportsShooter Accessory Kit awarded to one overall winner each month. The kit consists of such imaging essentials as a Canon pro-camera bag, a pair of Canon 10x25 compact binoculars and a treasure trove of Canon logoed goodies.

Based on the time-honored traditional newspaper industry clip contests (wherein photographers would submit their best published clips of the month to be judged by a panel of editors and photographers) the SportsShooter.com version made a few improvements to the rules, ensuring that no hint of bias or fotog-favoritism could even be implied. Member photographers can enter a maximum of six images per month in any combination of four categories: Sports Action, Sports Feature, News and Feature.

Since SportsShooter.com's launch in June 2002, more than 1500 photographers, photo editors, students, interns and assistants from around the world have been admitted as members. While fully 98% of the site is open to the general public at no charge, photo posting and other site privileges are restricted to members only. SportsShooter.com archives all back and current issues of the monthly SportsShooter email newsletter, edited by USA Today staff photographer Robert Hanashiro (currently 64 issues) including nearly 1,000 photo related stories. Currently each month, the site has 250,000 visitors and serves up 3 million pages of photographic content.

For more information about the contest, please visit www.sportsshooter.com.