Social Photography on sale in the US!

I've heard a rumour that my newest—and possibly prettiest—book, Social Photography is now on sale in the US! Naturally I'm incredibly biased (although my father probably wins the prize for most enthusiastic cheerleader), but I am very proud of it. In a nutshell, it's a guide to making the most out of your smartphone, from taking better pictures to sharing them astutely.

You can go into a bricks-and-mortar store to purchase it, use your preferred online retailer, or download it as an ebook.

For people in the UK wanting to lay their hands on a physical copy, they'll be here next month. Of course I'll be sure to tell you when! That would be now! Woohoo!

Twitter's augmented its photo capability: multiple images per tweet and image tagging

If you've ever been frustrated by Twitter's inability to attach multiple images to a single tweet, today's your lucky day. An update that's mid-roll-out will allow you to select up to four images to share in one 140 character missive. Tap on a preview image to see it full size, and then slide through to view the group.

The update has already made it to my iPhone and is steadily making its way to Android and the website version. However, multiple attachments haven't caught up to apps such as TweetDeck yet. So you're saved from seeing your friends' coffees in triplicate if that's your tweet loft of choice.

In addition to multiple images, tagging people in photos is now possible, too, and their handles won't eat into your 140 character count, either. A maximum of ten people can be tagged in one photo and they'll all receive a notification telling them that they've been featured in a photo. If you'd rather not be tagged in photos, you can turn off the feature in your settings. If you don't see the update yet, hold tight, it'll be there soon.

Update! 11:10, Thursday 27 March 2014: It seems as if TweetDeck is now displaying multiple images.

Bazaart: easy mobile image compositing with a social side

It started as a Pinterest-based fashion catalogue, but Bazaart's users saw a different potential in the app's capabilities and were more likely to be making collages with it, and not-necessarily fashion-related ones either. Like many good entrepreneurs, Bazaart's founders spotted this trend and rolled with it; as a consequence, they started to pivot away from fashion and towards creating a Pinterest collage-maker. Since then, Bazaart has continued its movement away from fashion and away from Pinterest. It's now a fully-fledged photo editor for iOS. Bazaart is now an editing programme designed to compile composite images from those on your mobile device's camera roll, together with a social sharing element. Once you've turned your brother's head into a beer bottle or given your girlfriend a bed of butterflies, you can share your composite with other Bazaart users, diverting it into searchable channels, for example 'funny' or 'art'.

Tap on any photo and it breaks it down into its component images; you can follow people whose work you particularly like; and you can engage with other users. There are other mobile compositing apps out there, but they don't come with the social features of Bazaart, and that's what its founders are aiming for. They want people to think of Bazaart as a social Photoshop for the masses.

Since it completed its pivot to social photography in June last year, Bazaart has enjoyed 250,000 mobile downloads, and has 100,000 monthly active users who have created over 350,000 composite images using more than 2 million photos. It's free to download, but only available for iPhone and iPad running iOS 7, or at least until the end of 2014, when the developers hope to have an Android version up-and-running.

Are you seeing Dubble?

The notion of multiple exposure photography is familiar: take a photo and then re-expose the same frame, or merge together two or more digital photos, to create a fun, or a ghostly, or a creative image. It's something that photographers have been doing since the dawn of photography, sometimes deliberately and sometimes accidentally, and whether you choose to shoot double exposures with your Holga or engage the multiple exposure setting on your Canon 6D, it's not that hard. But what about turning double exposures into something even more fun, very easy, and incredibly social? This is precisely what Adam Scott, Angelo Semeraro, Ben Joyce, and Uldis Pirags are aiming to do with their app Dubble.

You take a photo. You upload it to Dubble and share a few details about it. The Dubble algorithms then work their binary wonder and combine your photo with another from the Dubble community. Bingo! A socially, randomly generated double exposure. You and your Dubble counterpart can then both share your joint creation and take joint credit for it on Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter. By the end of the year there should be Instagram and Tumblr integration, too.

The Dubble community started up in the summer of 2013, with 40 family and friends of the founders, across 18 countries, taking and sharing their photos to create Dubbles. They've merged Spanish music festivals with the family pet, a flamingo with a cityscape, and a fairground carousel with a French beach. Now, the iOS app is publicly available for download and dubbling fun.

Adam Scott, Dubble's CEO is understandably excited about the app: 'We’ve worked really hard to develop an app that we hope will tap into the fantastic social and creative potential of collaborative multi-exposure digital blending with a complete stranger. Our ambition is to become the most exciting collaborative photography community in the world.'

I think I might go give this one a try!