The winners of the Olympus & Exhibtr.com student photography competition

In October last year Olympus and Exhibitr.com launched a competition for students, looking for the best images representative of 'People and Portraits'. After 2,000 entries and a great deal of deliberation by the four judges—professional photographers R.Cleveland Aaron and Jay McLaughlin, Jon Bentley of Channel 5’s Gadget Show, and Jack Harries of the extremely popular JacksGap website and YouTube channel—one winner and two runners up have been selected. Winning an Olympus Stylus 1 each for their images in the runners-up slots are Elliott Gunn, studying at the University of Gloucestershire, and Alecsandra Raluca Dragoi of Portsmouth University.

Speaking of Elliott's image, Jessa, R.Cleveland Aaron said: 'Elliott Gunn’s slightly abstract image gives the impression it was painted by brush as opposed to light. The perfect balance between creativity and technique is what makes this image a winner.'

Alecsandra's image, Freckled Boy, elicited the following comments: 'Alecsandra Raluca demonstrates great technical ability here in this image of a young boy. The clarity, the use of light and aperture control brings the boys features to the fore front of the image and our minds.'

And the winner? Water is Life, by Jasper Wilkins of the University for the Creative Arts, which topped the list because of its '... clever and powerful use of light in his composition communicates, with great eloquence, the title of this image. The viewer's attentions are kept solely on what’s important, the children and the water they crave. This image epitomises the power of photography,' according to Cleveland. Jasper has won an Olympus OM-D E-M5.

Water is Life, by Jasper Wilkins

Jumping on and off of Dropbox's Carousel

Yesterday, the cloud storage company Dropbox announced its 'Home for Life' initiative, making Dropbox a service that can 'take pain away from technology so you can do more with your life.' Part of that package is Carousel, a photo and video gallery that combines your Dropboxed images with those on your phone in one accessible, beautiful place. When you have downloaded the app, it backs up your mobile photos, and automatically backs up new ones, before sorting them—and those previously stored in Dropbox—into a chronological gallery. There's also the option to share hundreds of images quickly and simply via 'private conversations'.

The 'Home for Life' idea is about simplicity, and for Dropbox that means taking care of your photos in a fuss-free way as possible: 'And unlike other mobile galleries, the size of your Carousel isn’t constrained by the space on your phone, which means you can finally have your entire life’s memories in one place.' No, it's just constrained by the size of your Dropbox account. And with Dropbox being one of the more pricey cloud storage options out there, this could become expensive quite quickly. It's fuss-free, but at a price.

I love Dropbox. I use it every day. But not for photo storage. Its cost is prohibitive and despite the convenience and good looks of Carousel, it makes more sense for me to use Google+ to back-up my mobile images and Dropbox to store and share documents. When I'm able to auto-upload an unlimited number of standard-sized images (so that's 2048 pixels along the longest edge) from my phone to Google+, or full-sized ones at Google's much cheaper storage rates, it just doesn't make sense to use up my valuable Dropbox space.

If you're uncertain of entrusting your photos to Google, Flickr has an auto-upload feature in iOS 7 and it'll take you quite some time to burn through its terabyte of storage. Or there's Microsoft's OneDrive, which has an auto-back-up feature, too.

Dropbox has made a valiant attempt with Carousel to create a service that sets it apart from its competitors, with a swish interface and direct sharing options, but I'm not convinced that they offer me enough to justify the outlay. I won't be downloading right now. But I'm not you, and if you think it's what you're after, pay a visit to the Carousel website.

Lensbaby launches a fisheye lens

Lensbaby has just announced a 5.8mm ƒ/3.5 circular fisheye lens with manual focus for Canon and Nikon mounts. Although it has been optimised for APS-C sensors, you can use it on full-frame cameras. You'll be left with a smaller image circle is all. It should be able to focus as close as ¼", going all the way to infinity, and offers an 185° angle of view. At a smidge under $300, it's an extremely affordable addition to you kitbag, it just relies on you using its focusing ring to get your subject sharp, rather than on your auto-focus. If you're not sure that you can stretch to a Canon or Nikon-made lens, it's an intriguing alternative.

It's not on sale yet, but you can pre-order from Adorama. Canon's here; Nikon's here and both are priced at £299.95!

2014 Sony World Photography Awards Outstanding Contribution to Photography - Mary Ellen Mark

This year's Sony World Photography Awards Outstanding Contribution to Photography award is being made to documentary photographer, Mary Ellen Mark. Mark is renowned for her documentary images, often shot in black and white, and for the bond that she oftens develops with her subjects, returning to visit them long after her initial assignment is complete. Starting as a freelance, she often worked on film sets, but the four decades of her career has encompassed a great deal of travel photography. Much of her work reflects her humanism and her desire to capture and relate the stories of people living on the margins of society.

On being informed of her award, Mark commented: 'I feel very grateful to have received the Sony World Photography Awards’ Outstanding Contribution to Photography accolade. I follow a list of very prestigious people – they are among my favourite photographers.'

Astrid Merget, Creative Director of the World Photography Organisation, said of the award: 'Mary Ellen equates nothing short of excellence and we are honoured to present this award to her. Having spoken to dozens of her peers and critics, it is clear that Mary Ellen has made a permanent mark on our industry. She is fiercely committed and consistent in her work and is bound to show us a great deal more in the coming years.'

Mary Ellen Mark will receive her award on Wednesday 30 April at the 2014 Sony World Photography Awards Gala Ceremony. On the same night, the winners of the awards’ professional categories and the overall L’Iris d’Or / Sony World Photography Awards Photographer of the Year will be announced.

Examples of Mark's work will be exhibited alongside the winning and shortlisted images of the 2014 Sony World Photography Awards at Somerset House, London, from 1 to 18 May 2014. Tickets for the exhibition can be booked via the World Photography Organisation's website.

Mobile phone salesman convicted of pilfering nude photos from customers' phones

Do you have any naughty photos on your phone? You don't have to answer that, because I'm not sure that I really want to know, but if you do, just be careful should you have to take your phone in for any kind of repair. A particularly scurrilous character from South Wales has been handed a suspended prison sentence and placed on the sex offenders' register after admitting to two counts of unauthorised access of data under the Computer Misuse Act and an offence of voyeurism under the Sexual Offences Act. Lee Hawkes, of Swansea, was found to have 48 images of a woman in her 20s and 135 sexually explicit images of a woman in her 30s on his computer. He had obtained them when the women had brought their phones into the shop where he worked for repair. He transferred the images to his phone, and then onwards to his computer. It was a colleague who reported Hawkes to the police.

Apparently Hawkes showed off his swag to an amazed co-worker and claimed that it was 'normal behaviour' that was 'industry-wide'.

While I'm convinced that the overwhelming number of people behave responsibly when entrusted with our phones for repair or advice, and indeed it was a colleague of Hawkes' who reported him, I wouldn't put it past some toe-rag somewhere getting unsavoury ideas or a scoundrel or two having a go at seeing what tasty morsels they can find on people's camera rolls as we speak.

It might be a good idea to keep your nudes away from prying eyes.

(Headsup to the BBC)

Is Adobe's Lightroom Mobile fully embracing the mobile experience?

Adobe: purveyor of world-recogned photo editing options: some for desktop, some for mobile, and some that enable cross-over between devices, such as Photoshop Touch and Photoshop, via the Creative Cloud. That was all well and good, but what about Lightroom? When would that be available on a tablet as well as a desktop, people were wondering. What was taking so long? As of today, that wait for a mobile version of Lightroom is over. But is the Lightroom that people were expecting? For a start, it's Lightroom for iPad. There's no alternative tablet offering. You need to be using at least an iPad 2 running iOS 7 to make use of it.

Second, it isn't so much Lightroom for iPad, but Lightroom for desktop with an iPad outpost. As Adobe puts it, it's a companion app. Whatever you do on your iPad will always come back to your desktop Lightroom catalogue via the Cloud. For the majority of Lightroom users who want mobile access (and are iOS-based) this is probably how they envisioned using Lightroom mobile, as something that works in tandem with their desktop version: a manoeuvrable dinghy tethered to much bigger-engined boat. However, anyone who might have been expecting a stand-alone app independent of the desktop, however hollowed-out that might have needed to be, will be disappointed.

I'm not sure that the full fire-power of Lightroom would function on a tablet without being scaled down and refined in some way (and indeed Lightroom Mobile is a limited version of Lightroom), and making those types of sacrifices to functionality is possibly not something that Adobe wishes to contemplate or existing users would accept without having full-scale back-up, hence this iteration. Are Lightroom users the mobile-only type? Yet, I do feel as if there's a degree of reluctance to embrace a truly mobile experience on Abobe's part. The Creative Cloud is there when Adobe wishes to take advantage of it and lock users into a subscription, but not necessarily to put users' interests first and give them a workable and truly mobile-only editing option in a world that's increasingly portable.

Amongst other things, Lightroom mobile will allow users to:

• Sync mobile edits, metadata and collection changes back to the Lightroom catalogue on a Mac or Windows computer
• Automatically import images captured on an iPad and sync back to a Lightroom catalogue on the desktop
• Work on images, even when the iPad is offline, for a truly portable experience
• Sync photos between Lightroom 5 and Lightroom mobile; synced photos can also be viewed from any Web browser

And finally, the synchronisation-based architecture means that the mobile version of Lightroom is only available if you subscribe to the Creative Cloud. That means if you want the option to edit on your iPad, you need to shell out either £8.78 ($9.99) for the monthly photography subscription, or whatever Creative Cloud package takes your fancy. There's no option for stand-alone Lightroom users.

I'm not an iPad-user so there's no decision for me to make here, but I would be interested to know if you think that this version of Lightroom Mobile fulfils your needs, or if you think that Adobe has missed a trick.

Who still prints photos?

Back in the days of film, you didn't have much say over which of your photos were developed and printed, not unless you did it yourself. You took a roll of film, dropped it in at the chemist or local photographic shop, and waited for the prints to come back to you. We ended up with the duds along with the masterpieces, and shoeboxes of photos. Now, we can be far more selective about what we choose to print, and even if we want to print our photos at all. According to research conducted on behalf of Photoguard, a specialist photographic insurance company, 30% of people only ever look at photos online and about 55% of people who take photos have printed any in the course of the past year. Of those who do choose to print photos, it's people who prefer taking selfies who are most likely to send their images to print, with 82% of them doing so over the past year.

Of course, it's easy to assume the correlation between 'taking photos of themselves' and 'printing photos of themselves' but that's not necessarily so. They're just more likely to print photos that they've taken at all, and this might include coffee, cats, and kids, and beers, bicycles, and bumble bees.

Who's least likely to print their photos? It's the people who take 'art' photos (however that's defined) and photos of food. Apparently, 77% and 75% of people in those respective categories didn't send anything to print over the past year.

And why aren't people printing images? Apart from the 30% who only look at images online and the 20% who don't look at images at all, 37% of the survey's respondents found printing too expensive and 27% cited a lack of access to print facilities.

As someone who takes an enormous amount of pride in her photos and enjoys seeing her work in the flesh, it makes me quite sad that people either aren't quite sure how best to see their photos on paper so that they can hang them on their walls, put them on mantlepieces, or position them on desks, or find the cost of printing prohibitive. As Carly Wong, one of my Twitter friends put it: 'It's the test of a great photo too. If it's great it looks even better in print than it does on a computer screen.'

For the record, here are a few online print companies who'll run off 100 prints sized 6 by 4 for under £12 (and that's the top end), plus postage and packing. Some of them will give you free prints when you sign up, too.

• Boots
• Foto
• Photobox
• Photo Panda
• TruPrint

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If you want to know who was questioned for this survey, it was 320 professional photographers (UK adults who have been paid for photography work in the last three months) and 680 amateur photographers (UK adults who take photographs on a regular basis). The sample is broadly representative of the UK across age, gender and region. Respondents were interviewed between 13 and 17 January 2014.

Reflecta lets you digitise Super 8 reels with its new Super 8 Scanner

My grandmother has shoeboxes of old photos and negatives and even Super 8 film reels stashed away in her house. The photos we get out and look at every now and again, the negatives are a useful resource, but the Super 8 films don't get much of an airing anymore. Doubtless we're not the only family like this. But Reflecta has just announced its new Super 8 Scanner, that easily digitises old Super 8 film reels, giving them a chance to see the light of projection again. Although it's meant to be easy to use—you connect the scanner to a (Windows) computer via a USB cable, open the provided Cyberview software, insert the film reel into the scanner, and it then trundles through converting two pictures every five seconds, which you can crop and adjust the brightness and contrast of, too—it's not exactly cheap at £1,710 including VAT. It might be a good add-on for printing businesses, though.

The scanner produces videos with a file size of 190MB per 15m of film in HD quality, and its saved in AVI format.

If you're interested in one, the Reflecta Super 8 Scanner is being distributed by Kenro in the UK and Ireland. You can find out where to pick up one here.

Lensbaby turns to Kickstarter to fund a selective focus iPhone lens

There's already an array of additional lenses to augment our mobile phones, and quite a few of them have their origins in Kickstarter, too. There are telephoto and fisheye lenses that screw on or clip on as well as macro lenses on elastic bands, but now Lensbaby, known for its creative optics for dSLRs, is joining the fray with a campaign to fund a selective focus lens for iPhones 4s, 5, 5s, and 5c. It's called the Sweet Spot, and it will render images with a sweet spot of focus surrounded by blur. By pledging $50 to the campaign, you can pick up a Sweet Spot and start composing dreamy, selectively-focused shots. The Lensbaby attaches to an iPhone using both adhesive and magnets. One stainless steel ring sticks to your phone, around its lens, and the Lensbaby is mounted to that using magnets. The Lensbaby lens has magnets on both ends, meaning that it can be combined with other magnetic iPhone-compatible lenses, such as fisheyes and telephotos, for even greater control over your photos.

As well as the lens, there's an accompanying app. It's been developed to provide an optimal shooting experience with a Lensbaby lens. Primarily, it ensures that the image you see on your screen is the right way up, because the optical design of the lens means that it renders upside-down with the iPhone's native camera.

The catch is, of course, that these are only some-iPhone-models-friendly. If you're an Android user, or an iPhone 4 user, you're out of luck.

The question quite a few people might be asking is why has Lensbaby, a well-established company with a significant turn-over, opted to seek Kickstarter funding for a mobile-oriented version of its product? The answer's in the question: this is a departure from Lensbaby's dSLR stomping ground and it wants to be sure that this is a product consumers want. An iPhone-only offering with a modest $20,000 goal suggests that Lensbaby is using Kickstarter to dip its mobile toes in the water. With 199 backers and over half of its goal achieved within roughly 24 hours, I'd say that people are interested in a selective focus iPhone lens. Android users might even be interested in a version for their phones, too.

If you'd like a Lensbaby Sweet Spot for your iPhone, you can pledge over on Kickstarter.

Life Through a Contact Lens photography competition

Throughout 2014, online contact lens retailer GetLenses.co.uk is running a series of quarterly photography competitions that celebrate the wonder of vision and the eye. Winners are being rewarded with £500 of vouchers to spend on photography equipment at Amazon UK. Not bad! This quarter, the judges are looking for images that resemble an eye, from water swirling down a plughole to whirls of cloud in the sky. Submissions must be made by email to competition@getlenses.co.uk by 16 May 2014.

More details on the GetLenses website!

Full terms and conditions can be seen on the GetLenses website.

February's winning image: Tree Reflection by Neil Robertson in Denny

Getty Images Grants applications open today, with awards for editorial and creative photographers

Getty Images is celebrating the ten year anniversary of its grants programme by offering a range of awards to photojournalists, portrait photographers, and non-profits working in collaboration with photographers to get their projects off the ground. There are five awards of $10,000 each being made available to photojournalists looking to pursue projects of both personal and journalistic significance as part of the Editorial Photography grants.

Previous recipients have included Paolo Marchetti, for his project Fever, which explored the re-emergence of European fascism and Lynsey Addario for the 2008 Darfur project.

2008 Editorial Grant Recipient Lynsey Addario “Darfur”- Ismael Adam Abdullah, who is among the last dozen people from the Zagawa tribe in Muhajariya, reaches for some sugar from one of the UNAMID soldiers in the early morning next to the UNAMID base where they are staying in Muhajariya, in South Darfur. Photo by Lynsey Addario.

Furthermore, a $10,000 Lean In-inspired grant will be awarded to a photojournalist looking to bring to light a significant but under-reported story focused on girls or women who've brought positive change to their communities or personal lives.

These awards will be judged by a panel including David Furst, International Picture Editor, The New York Times; Teru Kuwayama, Photo Community Manager, Facebook; Sarah Leen, Director of Photography, National Geographic Magazine; Jean-Francois Leroy, Director General, Visa pour l’Image; and Amy Yenkin, Director, Documentary Photography Project, Open Society Foundations.

Applications close on 15 May 2014, with more details available here.

Two grants worth $20,000 each will be awarded under the Creative Grants programme, allowing non-profits who do not currently have the resources to work with photographers or videographers to further their causes, but recognise their value, to do so. There's also a Lean-In inspired grant for this programme, which will be shared by a photographer and creative agency whose joint proposal is to develop imagery for a nonprofit they choose to support which focuses on issues related to empowering women, girls, their families, and communities.

Finally, the Contour award will offer $10,000 to support an up-and-coming portrait photographer. She or he must have fewer than five years' experience in the field, and the award will be based on their existing portraiture work. The judging panel for this will be chaired by Terry O'Neill and include Cheryl Newman, Director of Photography, Telegraph Magazine; Stuart Smith, Designer; and Michael Hirschl, Director of Creative Delivery, BergHind Joseph Agency.

2013 Contour by Getty Images Portrait Prize Recipient Maja Daniels “Mady and Monette.”

More information, including terms and conditions and entry details, are available on the Getty Images InFocus blog.

University of Cambridge achieves its funding goal to secure Captain Scott's Antarctic negatives

Earlier this month we reported on the University of Cambridge's appeal to raise £275,000 before 25 March 2014 in order to secure a hoard of 113 negatives that record Captain RF Scott's earliest photographic experiments in Antarctica. The Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge already holds a significant collection of photographic materials accrued during Captain Scott's Antarctic expedition, but these negatives were seen as an important augmentation of the archive. Today, the University of Cambridge has announced it has successfully raised the necessary funds and the negatives will be joining Herbert Ponting's glass plate negatives and prints, prints made by other members of the expedition, and Scott's prints. In addition to public subscriptions and a grant from the V&A Purchase Grant fund, the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) has just awarded the Scott Polar Research Institute a grant of £233,450, which ensures that all the necessary funds have been raised to prevent an overseas sale of the neagtives.

Dame Jenny Abramsky, Chair of the NHMF, said, 'Captain Scott’s images provide us with an extraordinary insight into the rigours of his epic but ultimately doomed expedition. As precious as the corresponding original prints, these negatives record not only day-to-day life in the Antarctic but also the development of Scott’s photographic skills. The National Heritage Memorial Fund - the fund of last resort - is proud to be providing the final part of the funding jigsaw which will ensure these negatives are kept together as part of the Institute’s wider public collection.'

It's intended to mount an exhibition of the images following necessary restoration and a period of research, as well as digitising the material and making it more accessible to a worldwide audience.

400 images shortlisted for the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year competition

From over 6,000 entries, 400 potential winners have been selected for the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year competition and among them there's a welter of images from photographers aged under 17. Youngsters were able to enter their photos into three age categories—under 10, 11 to 14, and 15 to 17—and provided that they featured food, they were fair game for the competition. Now that the entries have been shortlisted, the judges, who include Yotam Ottolenghi and Jay Rayner, will whittle down their lists further. Overall winners can be selected to receive their awards on 23 April and be exhibited at the Mall Galleries in London between Thursday 24 and Sunday 27 April 2014.

Winners from the young people's categories will be presented with vouchers to put towards new camera kit!

You can take a look at all of the shortlisted young people's photos, together with the adult short-listed images, on the special Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year Shortlisted Gallery.

Only in England - now at the National Media Museum, Bradford

After its brilliantly successful run as the debut exhibition hosted at Media Space in the Science Museum, Only in England, Photographs by Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr, is now open at the National Media Museum in Bradford. Running from 28 March until 29 June 2014, it gives anyone who didn't manage to make it to London an opportunity to take in an exhibition that feels quintessentially English. The exhibition features 50 vintage prints as well as 50 previously unseen images from the Tony Ray-Jones archive, held by the National Media Museum. It was Martin Parr who helped to select these new prints from a selection of over 2,700 contact sheets and negatives. Martin Parr's works includes 50 rarely seen early black and white photographs from his series The Non-Conformists.

I enjoyed my morning moseying around the exhibition in London and while I did find it a little unwieldy to navigate, the photos were charming. My particular favourite, the image that made me smile and say 'Yep, only in England!' was Glyndebourne, 1967. All dressed up for the opera and having a champagne picnic with cows in the background? Of course it's Glyndebourne.

Opening times and visiting details are available on the National Media Museum's website. But the good news is that entry is free.

Oh, and if you'd like a little taster, we have an exlusive video of Martin Parr taking a look at some of Tony Ray-Jones' postcard collection!

Getting back to basics at the Silverhill Darkroom

The Silverhill Darkroom is a community darkroom based in Hastings, East Sussex, that is looking to provide affordable facilities to anyone living its environs. As well as providing members and non-members with the chance to develop their own prints, they'd also like to offer lessons in darkroom techniques, whether to school children or adults. The darkroom is looking to raise £1,000 to put towards renovating its facilities, providing some of the materials that it requires to get its workshop sessions up-and-running, and to establish a portable darkroom that can be used in schools and other off-site learning environments.

Although the project isn't a charity, it isn't exactly profit-oriented, either. Its goal is sustainability. Mostly, it's about creating an inclusive, affordable, and educational environment, ideally with the support of a part-time staffer.

While they're primarily asking for cash to help make their plans a reality, if you have any serviceable darkroom equipment in need of a good home, do get in touch with them as they might find it useful.

You can read more about the darkroom, what it offers, and about becoming a member on its website; if you're able to contribute something towards its funding goal, you can do that via Sponsume. For a £25 donation you can get a day's printing in the darkroom.

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.

Flickr's implemented its new photo page

In October last year, Flickr implemented a beta version of a new photo page. It was only a beta version, users could opt out, and they were invited to provide feedback on the new-look page, but inevitably there was considerable discontent with the proposed changes. I saw lots of frothing and foaming at the mouth in the feedback forum, some of it sadly lacking in articulated, constructive criticism. And in truth, the beta version did have plenty of bugs, omissions, and oversights that desperately needed rectifying. Flickr's venture into the realms of the new was along a rather rocky path and needed quite a bit of work. A little under six months after implenting the beta, and it seems that Flickr has rolled-out the new-look photo page for everyone. Or at least, I was using the old-style page, and now I'm suddenly not, and my 'Return to the old-style page' button has disappeared. The toddler-type tantrums of 'I don't like it' on the feedback page don't seem to have made much of an impact. And to be fair, neither have the calmer, cooler, and more considered objections to the new layout. The new-look page is here, whether users like it or not. Now it's time to see how many of the niggles have been addressed and kinks ironed out.

I'm pleased to say that the Flickr team has listened to quite a few of the gripes. For example: you can now see who 'favorited' your photos, rather than there being just a number of 'favorites'. Rich EXIF data are available. Tags have returned to being unhastagged. You can add a photo to a set from the photo page. Lots of the functionality that Flickr users knew and used didn't make it over in the initial beta release. That's been steadily remedied and things are looking more familiar, if different.

But not everything is yet hunky-dory. A particularly significant bug from my perspective involves sharing preferences. Mine are turned off in my settings. No one looking at my photos should be able to share them via social media or embed them into their blogs. Except that when I look at Flickr logged out of my account, my photos can still be shared and embedded. I'd like to see that fixed sharpish. And it would seem that Flickr's usual location services are still in the process of being ported properly. My map has disappeared and I'd like it back. That's irritating as opposed to concerning.

While I'm not especially concerned by being able to accompany my images with significant pieces of text, I favour short explanations, I know some people who feel aggrieved that the text box is so squashed and insignificant now. For them, being able to use words and pictures in tandem was a favourite feature of Flickr that has been marginalised.

Thankfully, there's a feedback button on every photo page. I shall be making use of it.

As for the new photo page itself, I'm not too bothered by it. My persistence in using the old page was primarily a result of the lack of functionality in the beta version and most, although not all, of those concerns have been addressed. What remains to be seen is how those who initially reacted so negatively to the redesign respond to the changes. Have they grown accustomed to it or have their complaints been addressed? Are the changes unpleasant enough or sufficiently significant in their eyes to see them walk away from one terabyte of free storage together with the network that they've built there? And if there is mass dissent amongst users, what will the impact be on Flickr? Even if, at worst, I'm ambivalent towards the new look Flickr page, what sort of effect will it have on my use of the site if people whom I follow and with whom I interact begin to desert it? I know of some users who feel the changes keenly, and if they choose to quit, my Flickr experience will be the poorer for it. A social network that steadily loses its sociability doesn't have a great deal of value.

Has Flickr really been made awesome again?

The HTC One (M8) is announced, with refocusing technology among other photographic toys

HTC's replacement for its HTC One wasn't exactly a well-guarded secret with most of the speculation centred on what exactly it'd be called. But now that the HTC One (M8) is here, it looks as if it has a very interesting camera function that I'm intrigued to try out. What, then, does it have to offer? First, HTC has stuck to its ultrapixel guns, with the emphasis being on the size of the pixels on the sensor, not how many there are to service the 28mm ƒ/2.0 lens. Gone is the 2013 image stabilisation technology, replaced by a smart stabilisation function that works with the ultrapixels. And added is the rear-facing second sensor that allows for better depth detection and Lytro-like control by taking two shots simultaneously with the UFocus function. But there's also Foregrounder, so that you can add effects and play with the background; Copy & Paste, a compositing feature that lets you copy and paste people appearing in one photo into a different image; and Dimension Plus, which allows you to alter the angle of your image by tilting your screen.

Similar to the flash in the iPhone 5S, the 2014-One has a dual flash that is designed to render better skin tones and a slow-motion video function, as well. And there're manual options for ISO and the like, giving you better control over your exposure.

For all that HTC isn't interested in the megapixel wars, it has bumped up the front-facing camera's megapixellage from 2.1 to 5, though.

The phone's 2.3Ghz Snapdragon 801 processor should be capable of whipping through your edits and if 16GB or 32GB of storage is insufficient for your archive of images, you can always make use of the micro-SD card slot.

The 2014 vintage One has taken cues from Apple, Samsung, and Nokia as well as going its own way when it comes to megapixels and fun and games. But however good the camera is on it, does HTC have the firepower to make it a go-to smartphone?

What could you buy for the price of a moon-walking Hasselblad?

By now we all probably know that a Hasselblad 500 that made it to the moon as part of the 1971 Apollo 15 mission, and came back again, has sold for €660,000 (after auction fees) to Terukazu Fujisawa, founder of Japanese retail chain Yodobashi Camera. So that's equivalent to £550,000, US$910,000, or AU$997,000, give or take. This got me wondering, what else could I buy for £550,000, photographic or otherwise?

Let's start with a Hasselblad, to put things into context. I've found a Hasselblad H5D-50, with either a 24mm, 28mm, 35mm, 50mm or 50-110mm lens retailing for £25,500. You could buy 21-and-half of those for what it cost to get the Hasselblad 500 that went to the moon.

Or, if you're looking for a top flight Nikon, the new D4S is £5,200. You could buy almost 106 of those for one moon-jaunting Hasselblad. Pair a D4S with an 800mm lens that costs about £14,000 and you've spent £19,200. That's a 28:1 ratio. (Or 39 800mm lenses alone.) If you're looking for something more entry level, a Canon 700D with a 50mm ƒ/1.8 costs in the region of £580. So that's 948 of those. Or it's 611 Fujifilm X100S.

Away from cameras, the average price of a yearling at Tattersalls' October 2013 was 207,501 guineas. What with a guinea being £1.05, you're looking at just about two baby race horses there. If you need somewhere to train your racehorses, there's a 14-box yard with a trainer's house selling for £550,000 in Newmarket right now. Or you could go for a one-bedroomed flat in central London.

At a recent auction of Impressionist paintings at Sotherby's in London, quite a few lots went for sums in the region of £550,000, so you could always try looking for a Bonnard or a Sisley if they take your fancy.

There's plenty of things you can spend your £550,000 on if you missed out on the moon-walking Hasselblad.

Scandal and drama at the Youth World Photography Awards as a winner is disqualified

Here's a life lesson: if you think that you can get away with submitting an image to an age-restricted photography competition, a competition in which you're subsequently named as a winner, when you're actually older than you're supposed to be, you should probably think again. The chances are that you'll be found out. Then you'll be stripped of your prize and you'll be plastered across the Intergoogles for all the wrong reasons. This is precisely what happened to Borhan Mardani, who was named as the winner of the Culture category of the Youth Sony World Photography Awards on Tuesday.

Mardani, it turns out, wasn't 19 when he took his 'winning' image, as he stated in his written declaration. Now that he's been found out, his prize has been removed from him and instead awarded to 19 year old Anastasia Zhetvina, from Russia, for her image Young talents.

Anastasia will now join Paulina Metzscher and Turjoy Chowdhury, the two other Youth finalists, in winning a Sony A5000 and the chance to be named Youth Photographer of the Year and flown to London to celebrate at the Sony World Photography Awards' party at the end of April.