Red Bull Illume 2010 Promo

It's time to talk about the Red Bull Illume photography contest once again. The promo from a couple of years ago was pretty awesome, this year's was actually better. It's kind of interesting in a way to see the pasts analog promo up against the new digital promo. I think it just goes to show how all professional photography has really turned to digital. This year they partnered up with SanDisk to give away USB Card Readers and 4GB Compact Flash cards. Pretty awesome promo items to go with the press release. Of course, the press release and other data including 10 images from the previous years contest (which I have added to my wallpaper collection) were on the CF card. It's actually a very nice card reader too, which is good since my internal one goes on the fritz every now and then. It has 4 slots that take microSD-HC, SD-HC/MMC, MS/MS-Pro/MS-Duo/MS-ProDuo/xD, and of course CF. For some reason it is really hard to find a card reader that supports HC cards, so I was surprised this accepted them. Then again this was made for professional photographers who only use HC cards and the press release was on one. It's connected by a standard mini-USB wire and sits on a magnetic base that says SanDisk on it. As you can see it sports the Red Bull Illume logo down the side as well. The card reader is very small and light weight so I guess you can take it on the go if you needed to. The packaging was nothing really special but it's cool still.

(Yes, that is a papercraft of Gir and a Piranha Plant from CubeeCraft.)

Red Bull Illume 2006 Promo

Red Bull has an adventure sport photography contest every year called Red Bull Illume Image Quest. The submissions are quite amazing and are from some of the most talented action photographers I have ever seen. There usually is a nice promo device given away inside of each press release when they announce the contest for that year. I have received two so far. This one from 2006 and the new one for 2010. 2006 which is pictured above consisted of a hard plastic case (measuring 11.5"x14.5"x2"), 11x14 posters of the winner of each category from the previous year, a CD containing jpgs of those images and the press release, a kit to build a pinhole camera, and a roll of really nice 35mm color film. I originally thought the pinhole camera would be cheap and flimsy, but then I built it. It's really nice. It consists of thick, heavy-duty cardboard and plastic knobs/brackets. All the other pinhole cameras I have used in the past used photo paper inside where you could only load one picture to take. This one takes actual 35mm film which is really cool and useful. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures taken with it yet so I can't show you the results but there was a lot of pictures submitted to Illume taken with this camera and they are incredible. I never thought you could get such amazing shots with a pinhole camera but it makes sense since everything is in focus due to the lack of a lens.