Paramount Pictures makes the digital-only distribution switch in the US

According to a report in the Los Angeles Times published over the weekend, Paramount Pictures has announced that it has ceased to distribute films in analogue format in the US. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues was its final 35mm format release and The Wolf of Wall Street has been a solely digital release. This transition to digital-only distribution is hardly unexpected. Both Disney and 20th Century Fox have communicated the expectation of digital-only content within the next few years to cinemas. Now that Paramount has set the ball rolling, it could happen sooner rather than later.

What of the impact on cinemas? First of all, this distribution decision applies only to US cinemas. In regions where analogue projection is still the norm, 35mm imprints will still be sent. Second, about 92% of cinemas in the US are capable of projecting digitally distributed content. For the remaining 8%, the cost of replacing their analogue projectors with digital projectors will be in the region of $70,000 per unit. For some smaller community-led cinemas, this could sound their death-knell.

At roughly $2,000 to produce a 35mm print and $100 for a digital print, studios' preference for digital format is obvious. Even if it does leave those who favour analogue prints reeling.

(Headsup to Engadget)

Stand on the spray-painted feet for superior snaps of San Francisco (and New York City)

If you're to wander through some of the more touristy areas of San Francisco and New York City, you might notice some bright yellow stencilled feet, spray-painted onto the pavement, and the exhortation to 'Place feet, point and click.' They're part of Mimi Chan's and Utsavi Jhaveri's #NoShittyPhotos project, aimed to help visitors snap the best possible archetypal touristy photos in the cities. Chan and Jhaveri were students at Miami Ad School and they decided that they could do something about the plethora of photos that people try to take of the most famous landmarks and monuments in San Francisco and New York City, but come out looking not-so-great. They could mark out the optimal places to stand to capture the Golden Gate Bridge and the Flatiron Building. No more ugly Instagram feeds, and #NoShittyPhotos.

In the process of spray-painting their tourist aids, Chan and Jhaveri narrowly escaped being caught vandalising at least once and quite a few of the NYC markers have since been removed by ant-graffiti vans. These guys would have a great deal of fun looking for the perfect spot to shoot in London, but they'd certainly be at the mercy of the law, and more concerningly, private security firms.

As for the concept, of course we don't want everyone's photos to look like clones, but if people get better photos because of a helping hand, I'm in.

(Headsup to DesignTaxi and Mimi Chan's site)

From now on, new photos uploaded to Flickr will have their EXIF copyright line preserved, whatever the size

There's been understandable consternation with Flickr that when images are downloaded from the site, they're stripped of their metadata. Any information attached to an image, from camera and lens type and geographical location to creator's name and additional copyright information is wiped away. For photographers who are doing their best to keep track of their images and prevent their unauthorised use, or just maintain their integrity while being able to show them off to the widest possible audience, this is more than a little galling. Flickr has listened to at least some of these concerns and from now on, the copyright field in an image's EXIF data will be preserved, for both original and resized image files. For the moment, this is only going to apply to new uploads but there is every intention to retro-fit this piece of data preservation to all uploaded (and then downloaded) images.

It's always worth noting that it is possible to restrict who has access to your original image files on Flickr, and thereby who has the ability to officially download them. (Any image on the Internet can be downloaded if you want it badly enough, hence 'officially'.) You'll find these permissions under Settings > Privacy and Permissions > Who can access your original image files?

Only the copyright line is preserved, nothing else, but at least it's a start. Full details are on the Flickr Forum.

Adobe unleashes some new Photoshop tools

Adobe has announced an update to its Creative Cloud suite of applications, and with it some new tools for Photoshop. Headlining the update is the integration of 3D printing capability into Photoshop. It should now be possible to design print-ready 3D models from scratch or to refine existing models and then send them to a locally connected 3D printer or make use of new partnerships with MakerBot and Shapeways to have them print 3D creations. If you're not so exciting by 3D printing as Adobe is (or perhaps wondering why 3D modelling is included in an image manipulation package), Adobe has also brough Perspective Warp and linked Smart Objects to Photoshop.

Perspective Warp is able to manipulate an image to alter the standpoint from which a subject is viewed. That could have particular creative uses when playing around with composites, but more general practical advantages to correct distortion in lenses.

Linked smart objects should improve collaborative processes by automatically updating a final design (for example a poster) if a file contained in it (a photograph, for instance) is amended or updated. No longer will the old version of the photo need to be removed and replaced with the new edit.

In line with the subscription model, these applications, together with those made to InDesign and Illustrator, will not have to be paid for and should be available for use as soon as Creative Cloud updates.

The ZSL Animal Photography Prize 2014 is now open!

The Zoological Society of London's Animal Photography Prize is now in its third year and open for entries. Seeing as you have to pay to submit your photos to the adult competition, we'll focus on the under-18s competition, which is free to enter. There are six categories and young photographers can enter one image into each. Each image needs to be different and they must relate clearly to the category into which they've been submitted. The categories are: The Perfect Moment, which rewards the patience needed to capture a stunning shot; Last Chance to See?, a focus on threatened habitats and endangered species; Weird & Wonderful looks for EDGE species, amazing adaptations, and unexpected surprises; Size Matters covers photos from the massive to the microscopic; The Birds and the Bees is for avians and invertebrates; and Deep & Meaningful is devoted to anything aquatic.

The judging panel includes television presenter Kate Humble and ornithologist Bill Oddie. The photographers of the images that they deem to be best in catoegory (one for each), will receive two complimentary tickets to the presentation ceremony and preview evening in London, a personalised certificate, and £250 in prize money.

The young person whose image is awarded the 'Judges Choice' for overall winner will receive a certificate and an additional £500 in prize money.

To be eligible to enter the young person's competition, you need to be under 18 years of age on the competition's closing date: 1 April 2014.

All of the details are on the ZSL website, and as always we advise you to check out the terms and conditions.

Moment wants to bring more variety to smartphone additional lenses via Kickstarter

How many different lens manufacturers can you name in the next ten or fifteen seconds? Quite a few, I bet. We're accustomed to being able to choose between our camera manufacturers' lenses as well as third party lenses manufactured by the likes of Sigma, Tamron, Tokina, Samyang et alios. Now that smartphones are the snapshot-camera-du-jour, and a vertaible feast of apps and accessories are springing up to help people make the most from them, why not a selection of additional lens manufacturers? Moment is aiming to bring some diversity to the smartphone lens accessory marketplace with its Kickstarter project that launches today. If it successfully raises $50,000, it should be shipping wide-angle and telephoto lenses, suitable for iPhones (4s, 5, 5c, and 5s), iPads (third and fourth generation iPad 2), and Samsung Galaxy smartphones (S2, S3, and S4), to its backers around June 2014.

The wide-angle lens offers a 35mm equivalent focal length of around 18mm (it varies slightly according to phone model); the telephoto lens' focal length equates to approximately 60mm, again depending on the smartphone model, in 35mm equivalent. Pledge $49 and you put yourself in line for one lens; $99 will secure you a pair.

The mounting mechanism attaches a metal plate to your phone—either with or without a case—and to this you secure the lens with a bayonet fitting. The Moment team thinks, after lots of prototype testing, that this is the easiest, quickest, and most secure mount around.

Moment is convinced that it offers the best quality lens you can attach to a smartphone. Some of its developers have worked in the manufacture of cinema lenses, and they've applied that knowledge to Moment's smartphone attachments to minimise distortion and chromatic aberration and maximise sharpness. Without a model to test, you have to take the manufacturers' word for it; but that's the gamble of Kickstarter.

You can check out the Moment video down below, or wander over to its Kickstarter page for a closer look!

Update! Moment reached its Kickstarter funding goal in under 24 hours. But that shouldn't stop you from taking a look!

After the competition, here's how the cover of Social Photography looks

In November last year we ran a competition, together with the Ilex Press, to find a photo to add to the front cover mosaic of my forthcoming book, Social Photography. So many fantastic entries were submitted to the pool that we found ourselves selecting two winners, who were announced in December. After a little rearrangement by Kate the Designer, there's now a gorgeous final version of the cover!

In case you're wondering, Elisa's photo is in the top left corner, the very first image on the cover; Ben's is the third image down in the fifth column across. It's definitely worth checking out their Flickr streams, too!

Google's just made it easier to search for images according to licence type

'I found it on Google, so that makes it alright!' No, no, and no. Just because you found an image on the Intergoogles does not make it free to use. How many times have we been through this? I've lost count, I'm sure. It's simple: unless the copyright owner says otherwise, you can't use her or his photos without permission. There are some images that are free to use, but you have to search for them specifically. Thankfully, Google has just made that easier. To be fair, Google Image Search has allowed for refined searches for quite some time, but now they've made it more obvious and easier. Hit the 'Search tools' button and it presents a series of drop-down menus that allow you to select the size, colour, age, file type, and licensing options for your desired image.

Searchers can choose licences covering available for reuse, commerical reuse, reuse with modification, and commercial reuse with modification. So whether you need a poinsettia to illustrate a blog post or a giraffe to add to a surreal composite, the search tools to find them are at your fingertips.

According to the tweet from Googler Matt Cutts, the suggestion for the refinement came from law professor Lawrence Lessig, who's heavily involved in the Creative Commons movement.

Now you can slice/dice Google image searches by usage rights under "Search tools. Thanks to @lessig for the request! pic.twitter.com/8mQxxebTHJ

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) January 14, 2014

It will still be incumbent upon anyone wanting to reuse an image to double-check its rights and ensure that they comply with any caveats, for example proper attribution, that might be ascribed to it. However, together with Bing's refined image licence search, there are fewer and fewer excuses of the whine of 'But I found it on the Internet!' when it comes to image theft an misuse.

(Headsup to Dave Stevenson and the Google blog)

Snapchat spam gets an apology

Following revelations over Christmas of a potential software vulnerability in its 'Find Friends' service that could allow its users' names to be linked with their phone numbers and a subsequent security breach around New Year, the last thing that ephemeral-image-sharing app Snapchat needs is another bothersome bug. Especially when it was veeeerrry slow to offer an apology and a fix to the first one. But that's just what Snapchat's got. This time, its users are reporting the receipt of unusually high numbers of spammy 'snaps'. Snapchat's developers are insistent that this incident is in no way related to the festive season 'Find Friends' vulnerability and they're working on a fix for it. They've also apologised for the inconvenience, which is a definite improvement on last time. However, until they can push through an update, the best advice on offer for users to adjust their settings so that only their friends can send them snaps. There's no means to report a Snapchat spammer, only block her or him, but maybe with this spate of spam, a solution will emerge.

(More details on the Snapchat blog)

Will Toshiba be bringing Lytro-like refocusing to smartphones?

We've grown accustomed to the idea of photos that we can refocus after the fact thanks to Lytro's lightfield camera and to Nokia's Refocus app that takes between two and eight photos that you can play with to your heart is content. Now Toshiba has announced the first dual camera module designed for inclusion in phones and tablets, which is able to record depth data and well as an image simultaneously. The catchily named TCM9518MD comprises two quarter-inch five-megapixel CMOS camera sensors and a dedicated processor. This dual camera module can capture images where the foreground and background, and everywhere in-between, are in focus along with depth data for each object in the picture. Not only can the module allow you to focus, defocus, and refocus the images it produces, but it can generate 13-megapixel images by up-scaling images taken by its two cameras.

Andrew Burt, vice president of the Image Sensor Business Unit, added that: 'Not only does the dual camera module enable these advanced capabilities [e.g. refocusing] with fast digital focus and little shutter lag, the device doesn't require any focus motors, so it can be built much thinner than today's 13-megapixel camera modules.'

Toshiba has made sample modules available to smartphone and tablet manufacturers (they cost $50 a pop), so which devices will be the first to feature them?

(Headsup to the Verge, further information from PR Newswire)

The inimitable xkcd on taking photos

That whole debate about whether taking photos diminishes or improves your memory of events? I couldn't give a toss about it. Sometimes waltzing around a dancefloor with my brother to Sweet Caroline is a far better experience than taking photos of everyone else dancing. Other times, it's the act of climbing onto the shed roof in a floor-length skirt to take a picture of everyone singing happy birthday to my mother that forms the strongest recollection of an event. Use the camera or put it down: it doesn't really matter. You have to do what feels more important right then and there. But I do know that I'd rather not watch the entirety of a live concert via a four-inch smartphone screen and I certainly don't want my view obscured or enjoyment diminished by other people doing just that.

The wonderful xkcd sums up my sentiments perfectly. Thank you, Randall Munroe.

Polaroid's novelty slalom

Polaroid has been showing off a few different products at CES, and not all of them cameras. However, photographically the interest has been in its square-shaped instant camera, the Socialmatic, and the tiny cube-shaped C3 camera. Neither of them is especially a mainstream product, but there are plenty of companies who can succeed in making a go out of the novelty factor. The skill is in marketing a product to which people can become easily attached, at a price that works. Has Polaroid accomplished this? The Socialmatic was announced some time ago; now we're told that we can expect it in the autumn and it'll cost $299. It has a 14 megapixel front-facing camera and a two megapixel rear-facing camera. It is built on an Android platform. It can share images over a wi-fi connection or via Bluetooth. And it can print sticker photos using its built-in ZINK printer. Along with its square shape, that's its killer feature that gives it desirability and the necessary degree of novelty. The question is, would you spend $299 on a novelty camera? Of course it is going to have appeal to some people, but I suspect they'll be limited in number. Continuing to use the smartphone that you already have and linking it up to a (much cheaper) Fujifilm instax SHARE SP-1 printer would make much more sense.

The C3 cube, on the other hand, seems to hold more appeal. It measures 35mm by 35mm by 35mm; holds a five megapixel camera with a lens that has a 120° angle of view; is waterproof to two metres; and it contains 2MB of internal storage that can be augmented with a micro SD card. There's a button to release the shutter and it'll cost $99. It's perfect for any sort of remote-controlled vehicle, for sticking to a helmet or set of handlebars, or for wedging in a corner. It's still a novelty device, but a more affordable one.

Canon Powershot N100 - another attempt at being cool

Canon has announced the Powershot N100 at CES: the idea behind it (or even in front of it), is that it's a camera that can tell both sides of the photographic story with simultaneous functioning front- and rear-facing cameras. After the launch of the Powershot N at CES last year, which appeared to be Canon's quirky attempt to lure smartphone users back to compact cameras (as if that were ever going to happen in a hurry), the N100 is more functional type of camera aimed at people who want to use photos to capture life in front of and behind the lens, and share it easily. My immediate reaction to the dual camera function is that I have absolutely no desire for anyone or anything to try to photograph me while I'm taking a photo. I'm usually pulling a face or sticking out my tongue in concentration (I have a habit of doing that). Canon, however, sees it as a way to ensure that you record your own reaction, either in still or video, to a situation that warrants it: baby's first steps, for example.

Smart Auto Technology has a bank of 58 different scene options to ensure that you make the most of your photo situations. There's the Hybrid Auto feature, too, which captures four seconds of video before you release the shutter when taking a still image.

There's also a Story Highlights mode that's meant to take the strain out of editing. It uses an algorithm to analyse all of your photos and create a highlights album organised by theme, date, or faces (if you've registered with the camera). I don't know about you, but I'd be concerned that the important photos, the ones that weren't quite perfect or captured something slightly abstract, would be overlooked and ignored.

The N100 has built-in wi-fi. It connects to smartphones using the Mobile Device Connect Button with NFC support, via Canon’s CameraWindow app. You can also back up your images to cloud storage sites or Flickr via the Mobile Device Connect Button in conjunction with CANON iMAGE GATEWAY. The CameraWindow app also gives you the option to remotely control the N100 directly your smartphone.

The N100 has more bells, whistles, and toys than you can shake a stick at, with modes such as background defocus and Creative Twist that lets you capture six different versions of one image. It has 46 different creative effects, grouped into four categories – Monochrome, Retro, Special and Natural – for you to pre-select from before you start shooting.

Spec-wise, the N100 is powered by a DIGIC 6 processor with a 12.1 Megapixel 1/1.7" CMOS sensor. On the front it has a 24mm lens with 5× optical zoom. On the back, it's a 25mm lens. It'll cost £350 (or $349 if you're in the US). And it won't be available until May. May!

Oh Canon. I think you've done it again. I think you've tried to be quirky, fun, and innovative, but you've ended up looking like your great auntie Doris who's turned up to a party wearing clothes that were in fashion 20 years ago and are four sizes too small for her. I doubt that much here can tempt someone away from a smartphone for £350, or offer much that someone who's actively looking for a compact camera really needs. Given that it's not slated to appear until May, how many smartphones will be recording with front- and rear-facing cameras simultaneously by then? You have to give Canon some marks for trying, but not many for execution.

Want to take photos of the weather? Please be careful

The UK has been battered by high winds and heavy rain on an intermittent basis since the end of October last year. Powerlines go down, homes flood, and trains and planes are cancelled. We appear to be caught in a cycle of disruption and inconvenience followed by respite that's becoming increasingly trying and increasingly deadly. Sadly, it isn't just people who are in the wrong place at the wrong time whose lives are being taken by falling trees or rising waters. Today the search is resuming for Harry Martin, a photography student from South Devon, who went out to photograph the stormy coastal waters on Thursday and has not been seen since.

In excess of 200 people have been involved in the search for the young man over the weekend along a 20 mile stretch of coastline close to his family home at Membland, Newton Ferrers.

Inspector John Livingstone, of Devon and Cornwall Police, said that although the primary concern was that Harry had become lost on the exposed stormy coastline, it was always possible that he may be with friends. Being absent for this long without letting anyone know his whereabouts is, however, out-of-character for the young man who is studying film production at Greenwich University and was back home with his family in Devon for the Christmas holidays.

Waves of up to eight metres have been recorded off of Land's End, flats overlooking the seafront in Aberystwyth have been evacuated, and huge waves and more flooding are expected across the country today and tomorrow. All of this might look spectacular and make for very impressive photographs, but please be careful. I've done some ludicrous things to get photos before now, but they're never worth risking your safety, or those of people who might have to rescue you.

(Headsup to the BBC, additional information from the Torquay Herald Express)

What's the situation with the Snapchat hack?

The Snapchat security vulnerability is a story that has quietly grumbled on over the Christmas and New Year period, but is hopefully reaching some kind of resolution, at least for the bugs highlighted on Christmas Eve. To recapitulate, Gibson Security discovered potential exploits in Snapchat's Find Friends feature and informed the app's developers of them in August 2013. One of these bugs allowed someone to upload a list of random telephone numbers and match them to Snapchat users' names. The other allowed the creation of multitudes of dummy accounts. Bring on the spammers and maybe even stalkers, then. Although Snapchat made some moves to address the faults, it didn't close the loopholes entirely. Gibson Security, therefore, took it upon itself to document Snapchat's API on Christmas Eve, making the vulnerability obvious for anyone who wanted to abuse it. The hole was exploited on New Year's Eve, when 4.6 million of Snapchat users' partially redacted names and telephone numbers were published online, albeit for a limited period of time.

With the ante having been upped, Snapchat has been forced to issue an update to its app that patches the vulnerability. It hasn't been released yet, but when it is, it will allow users to opt out of the Find Friends feature after they have verified their telephone number. Snapchat has also stressed that no other information, including images, was accessed during the attack.

Bugs happen and so do security breaches; what matters is how companies and developers respond to them. Perhaps the most disturbing element of this situation isn't that Snapchat users' details could potentially have been exploited, but Snapchat's ostrich approach to security. Rather than addressing the situation thoroughly and immediately when first informed of it, it made a half-baked attempt to implement a patch that could still be exploited. When it was called out, it reacted slowly with a fix that is opt-in rather than opt-out, and it hasn't apologised to its users. Food for thought.

You can read what Snapchat had to say for itself on its blog.

Want to learn how to use your shiny new camera? Try the Photocritic Photography School!

You have a shiny new camera with interchangeable lenses, more knobs and dials than the TARDIS, and enough buttons to keep a three year old happy for hours. It's thrilling and exciting, and you cannot wait to get started. But where exactly do you start? How can you get off of the automatic mode and take control of all the picture-making marvel that your camera has to offer? You could always sign up for the Photocritic Photography School.

It's a year-long course, with a lesson and an assignment delivered to your email inbox every three weeks. Once you complete your assignment and share it in your class' pool, you'll receive some feedback on your endeavours. (We also encourage our students to comment on their classmates' work: the more thoughts the better!) It starts with some simple techniques to see an immediate improvement in your photos and moves through technical, creative, and practical exercises to see you taking better photos week on week. No pressure, and lots of fun!

Even better: if you sign up for the class that starts on 3 January, it's free! What are you waiting for? The sign-up form's here!

The winner of the Well Done U short film competition

In early October, we featured a short film competition called Well Done U: the quest for a well made two minute film, suitable for all. That is, it needed to conform to the British Board of Film Classification's U certificate criteria. The competition was being run by the Kermode and Mayo Film Review Show, hosted on BBC Radio 5 Live. Last week, after receiving hundreds of entries, they announced the winner. The honour of a formal BBFC certification for the film and a trophy went to Philip Chidell for his short, Pong.

The winner is great, but the runners' up films are super, too, and worth a look.

Flickr has a new embed feature. Expect uproar.

In another update that aims to make Flickr a more fully web-integrated photo-sharing experience, it has rolled out a revised photo embed function. This one should make it easier to add full-bleed Flickr photos and videos to external sites. Any embedded photo will automatically be displayed with its full title and its owner's Flickr name. Flickr's stats feature will also track the number of views your photos embedded into external sites are generating, to give you an idea of their popularity and reach.

Before anyone and everyone starts to yell that Flickr is being irresponsible, is encouraging copyright infringement and image theft, and doesn't have the best interests of its users and their images at heart: you can disable embedding. You do this in Settings, under privacy and sharing. It will also prevent other users from tweeting or pinning your photos at the same time. This doesn't stop you from being able to tweet, pin, and Facebook-share your own images, though. But if you're using the new photo experience beta (which I'm not), it doesn't look as if you can embed your own images into external sites when sharing is restricted. Self-embedding is still possible with share-restricted photos in the old layout though.

Here: I've embedded my own image straight from Flickr, but every Tom, Dick, Harry, Annie, Melanie, and Madge doesn't have the ability to do this because I've disabled the feature for them.

Whether this is by accident or deign on Flickr's part I'm not sure, but I have mentioned it to them. It's a useful feature for me, but I prefer to retain as much control over the use of my images as I can.

If you share a photo privately, either with your Flickr friends and family or through a guest pass, it can't be embedded by those people who are privileged to see it. It remains a privilege.

As a reminder, you can also restrict who is able to download your images from Flickr, too. Of course, if someone really wants to use your image, they will, because any image that can be seen on a screen can suffer from copyright infringement. There are tools available to help you protect them, however.

Enabling better image embedding isn't just about spreading the beauty of Flickr users' gorgeous photos; it's also about spreading the Flickr brand, too. Easy embedding will encourage people to use the feature and encourage people who're seeing embedded Flickr images on external sites to visit Flickr itself and to see more of a user's Flickr photostream. Flickr doesn't wish to remain an isolated realm of internalised image sharing, it has a world to take on.

What happened to the Lightstrap Kickstarter project?

Just over a week ago we featured a Kickstarter project called Lightstrap: a temperature- and brightness-adjustable ringlight set into an iPhone case, which aimed to bring better lit iPhone photos to everyone and rid us of the curse of evil red-eye. The project needed to raise a fairly sizeable $245,000, but only six days into its campaign it appeared to be well on course to achieve that with $67,197 pledged to the cause by 540 people and quite a lot of press coverage to boot. So why did Brick and Pixel, Lightstrap's developers, pull the plug on the Kickstarter campaign? In a message to its Kickstarter backers, Brick and Pixel stated that while the project appeared to be on course to hit its goal, it wasn't a slam-dunk. When it was offered the opportunity to put the Lightstrap into production through traditional channels, Brick and Pixel didn't feel that it could refuse. The campaign has been cancelled and anyone who pledged money to it won't have it debited from their accounts. Instead, they're going to have to wait for the Lightstrap to go on sale in stores and online.

As you might expect, there are quite a few disgruntled punters out there. Several of them are deeming the Kickstarter campaign a disingenuous attempt to raise the Lightstrap's profile and prove its viability as a product, lure in an external investor, and then dump the backers when a better offer came along. Quite a few would like to have been acknowledged for their support and perhaps offered a discount on the Lightstrap if and when it does make into full production. Even with those backers who remain hopeful for a positive outcome for the Lightstrap, there remains a sense of unease and there's certainly been an erosion of goodwill towards Brick and Pixel.

When I contacted Cassidy Crawson, one of Lightstrap's developers, he told me that he feels the backers' frustrations, but that it's a complicated business and they're doing their best to bring Lightstrap to fruition: 'We are deeply invested in this product (personally and financially) and we are making hard decisions with the goal of bringing Lightstrap to market successfully.' Brick and Pixel really do want the Lightstrap to make its way onto people's phones, but in one way or another they've managed to make a mistake.

Reading between the lines, it would seem that Brick and Pixel somehow underestimated what it takes to bring a product to reality, and how hard it can be to accomplish that through Kickstarter. Even when you have backers on your side, there are a great many other factors that need to be considered and you really do have to be prepared for anything. Furthermore, they also seem to have misjudged the depth of feeling that backers have for campaigns that they support. When we pledge money to projects, we're putting faith in the people behind them to deliver what they say they will. If a project doesn't reach its funding goal, that's all well and good and thems the breaks of Kickstarter. But if the project lead hasn't got it right, it's more than a sense of disappointment, there is, perhaps, an erosion of trust, too. For Lightstrap, I hope the it doesn't have a negative impact on its potential availability. For prospective Kickstarter project leads: check, check, and check again. And be prepared for anything.

In whichever way that the Lightstrap makers didn't get it right, it's a shame. I hope that they can somehow redeem themselves and finish what they've started.

Video in and around the sea for around £100 with the Braun Vidi Proof

'Cheap' and 'underwater safe' aren't words that often go together when it comes to cameras. 'Cheap' is of course a relative term, and to what depth you can take a camera under the surface is also variable, but most of the time you're looking at a good few hundred pounds to get your hands on anything that you can drop in the surf. Braun is hoping that its new Vidi Proof Camcorder will allow snorkellers, surfers, and kayakers a reasonably priced option to record their exploits in motion and stills pictures. Primarily it's designed for making video, upto 60 minutes in length, and to a depth of three metres. However, it's capable of capturing stills, too, with a five megapixel CMOS sensor and 4× digital zoom. It runs off of two AA batteries and uses a Micro SD card up to 16GB in capacity.

If you're thinking that Braun is more readily associated with electric razors, depilators, and toothbrushes, that's a different Braun, which is owned by Proctor and Gamble. This Braun is the Braun Photo Technik GmbH, which used to be known as Carl Braun Camera-Werk. This company specialises in digital imaging equipment, from binoculars and graphics tablets to filters and video cameras.

The Vidi Proof will cost in the region of £100 and it should be available soon.