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.

JVC Kenwood joins the Micro Four Thirds group

Olympus and Panasonic unveiled the Micro Four Thirds standard, with its smaller and lighter weight interchangeable lens system, back in 2008. Olympus has focused on building the OM-D line built to Micro Four Thirds standards while Panasonic produced some cameras that are great for making videos. Today, JVC Kenwood has announced that it is joining the Micro Four Thirds group and will be releasing a series of advanced Micro Four Thirds products. In a joint statement from Olympus and Panasonic, they were keen to stress the development of the Micro Four Thirds standard in a way that reflects the interests of the individual companies and provides consumers with a selection of different products: 'The release of these new products will add to the growing diversity of the Micro Four Thirds System lineup, which now consists of a wide range of products that represent the unique characteristics of each participating company.'

I'm awaiting confirmation from JVC Kenwood on its expected Micro Four Thirds product range and expectations.

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.

The positive impact of negative space

One of the fundamental rules of photography that we're all taught early in our learning curves is to 'fill the frame'. In fact, the first lesson in the Photocritic Photography School is all about getting closer to the subject and making sure that there's nothing extraneous in the frame. You don't want it to be a tiny, practically unidentifiable blob somewhere in the image that your eye has the hunt to locate. As a consequence, the idea of 'negative space'—or the presence of nothingness in an image—probably seems counter-intuitive. Instead of seeing them as polar opposites, it might help to think of 'getting closer' and 'negative space' as two sides of the same coin that complement each other. Sometimes, a little bit of nothing is just what your subject needs.

Bringing balance

If you have a complex subject that’s detailed and busy, contrasting it against an area of nothing will bring some balance to the composition. It helps the eye to find a point of focus and to stop the image from feeling chaotic.

Even if you’ve done all the ‘right’ things compositionally—you’ve selected the appropriate frame orientation, you’ve used the rule of thirds or the Golden Ratio, the image is balanced, there are leading lines directing the eye to the subject—sometimes an image won’t look as good as it could. By putting some negative space around the subject you give everything ‘room to breathe’ and it somehow becomes better balanced.

A sense of space

If you fill your frame with a recurring pattern or repeating subject, like a mosaic or a pile of fruit, and not give it any boundaries, you can create a sense of the infinite in your photos. Surrounding a solitary subject with negative space creates a similar effect.

For example, you could photograph a sailboat on a lake and include the shoreline, which limits the feeling of space. By composing your image so that you capture just the sailboat on a negative space of water—perhaps by altering you vantage point slightly, maybe by getting in a little closer, or even shooting a touch wider—it is suddenly sailing on an infinite sea.

Creating atmosphere

Negative space can contribute to the atmosphere that you want to create in your photographs. Dark negative space can imply brooding or foreboding. Negative space in particular colours can lend a certain feeling to an image; blue is calming, for example, whilst yellow is uplifting. Or there's the opposite of dark and foreboding with positive and airy negative space created by light colours.

Accentuating the subject

When there is nothing else to look at except the subject in an image, that’s exactly where the eye will go. Placing the subject in a sea of negative space will accentuate it. Obviously this is ideal for product photography, when you want the £50,000 diamond ring to be the centre of attention, but you can also use it to make dramatic or slightly surreal images that aren’t intended to sell something!

Achieving this sort of effect isn’t difficult. The first option is to photograph your subject on a plain background. If you don’t have a professional backdrop, a scarf or a sheet will work, too. However, you can also use lighting to surround your subject in negative space. You can either light your background so strongly that you ‘blow it out’, or over-expose it to the extent that the sensor cannot detect anything in that area; or you can light the subject significantly more strongly than the ambient light, so that it will look as if it is emerging from the darkness. Both techniques are highly effective and you can have a lot of fun experimenting with them.

Enhancing patterns and shapes

Our eyes and brains are constantly roving for patterns and shapes: think about gazing up at a bright blue sky, and how we look out for cloud formations that resemble faces, animals, and countries. The interaction of positive and negative space in a photograph, especially a minimalist black and white composition, creates similar opportunities to make and look for shapes. You just have to look out for the interplay between objects or between light and shadow.

So that's something for you to try this weekend: looking for the positives in negative space.

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.

Flickr's product chief Markus Spiering joins EyeEm to promote its US development

Markus Spiering, who until Monday was Head of Product at Flickr, has announced he's joined Berlin-based photo-sharing community EyeEm, where he'll be focused on expanding the app into the US market and developing the product team. While Spiering is currently sitting at a desk in Berlin, he will be opening up a San Francisco EyeEm office later this year.

I'm excited to share that today I joined @EyeEm, an amazing and award winning photography startup. http://t.co/fWXz7GgYfs

— Markus Spiering (@spieri) April 3, 2014

Spiering was named as one of Silicon Valley's top 40 players under the age of 40 in 2013, and was seen as instrumental in halting a decline in Flickr's decline after its sale to Yahoo!, so to some leaving a Wall Street-listed company for a Berlin-based start-up might seem like an unusual move. However, it's the challenge of raising EyeEm's US profile to which Spiering is looking forward, having watched the progression of the company since its inception. And EyeEm has been making waves of its own recently, having announced both its Market, where its members can sell their images, as well as a deal that will allow its users to licence their mobile photos through Getty Images.

Florian Meissner, EyeEm's CEO welcomed Spiering to their team: 'We feel honored and are understandably excited to have Markus on our team. We have been consistently impressed with his accomplishments across product and design during his tenure at Flickr. With his vast experience in product, mobile applications and design, as well as his network in North America, Markus will be crucial in realizing EyeEm´s visions about the future of photography.'

EyeEm is going places, and with Spiering on board, it could be getting there a whole lot faster.

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.

The palm-sized Projecteo Instagram projector

I have a new favourite toy. It's palm-sized, it's battery-powered, and it's a projector for Instagram images. It's called a Projecteo. Projecteo was conceived by the same people who make my favourite image-emblazoned edible snacks, Boomf marshmallows. This time, instead of selecting nine of your Instagram images to have printed onto bite-sized puffs of sugar, you choose nine images to have made into a miniature projection wheel comprising a single frame of 35mm slide film. Or 18 to have made into two wheels. Or 27 for three wheels. You get the picture.

One projector and one wheel of images costs $34.98, including world-wide shipping. Extra wheels cost $8.99 each. Mine arrived within a few days of being ordered.

It was rather fiddly to insert the batteries into the projector, in fact I needed to get someone else to remove the battery case, but otherwise it was easy to insert the wheel, turn on the light, and start projecting images onto the walls, ceiling, blinds, doors, or floor, using the focusing ring to render them crisply. I spent most of yesterday evening shining peaches and bees and the Queen Elizabeth II bridge onto any flat surface I could find.

Just as with the marshmallows, dark photos don't come out very well, but bright ones look great. At $35 a go, a Projecteo is too expensive for a wedding favour, but it does make a fantastic little present. I'm off to see where else I can shine my images.

Sean Batten, the winner of the UK National Award - 2014 Sony World Photography Awards, chats with Photocritic

As part of the 2014 Sony World Photography Awards, the judges went on the hunt for the best photographers representing a selection of different countries. In the UK it was 41 year old Sean Batten, a C++ and C# software developer who's from Bristol but now lives in Surrey, who came out on top. He particularly likes architectural and street photography, so his winning image of Canary Warf tube station isn't too much of a surprise! Sean took his winning image at Canary Wharf tube station at 12:54 on a Wednesday. He says that it was planned to the extent that he took his camera to work that day knowing that he wanted some photos of Canary Wharf and the area, but that particular view came about by chance: 'I just happened to go into the smaller entrance on Upper Bank Street and was impressed by the smaller space (compared to the rest of the station) and the impressive, and imposing, roof.'

Taking photos on the Underground isn't anything new for Sean, so he knew what to expect in terms of being able to get his shot: 'The staff don’t mind what you do as long as you’re not obstructing anybody and you don’t use a tripod.' Not being able to use a tripod meant that he shot wide open at ƒ/2.8 with his 14­-24mm lens on his Nikon D800. The light coming in from the glass roof together with the shadows meant he needed three bracketed shots to cover the dynamic range.

He took a series of images to help secure against camera-shake, and although he knew he had a good image on his hands when he started to process the sets, it was down to social media that he entered it into the Sony World Photography Awards. 'I uploaded it to Flickr and got a lot of positive feedback, so it seemed like an obvious choice to enter into the Sony WPO awards.'

Now that Sean has a new Sony A7 to play with, I asked him if there's anything in particular that he's looking forward to photographing. Unsurprisingly, he's looking forward to taking it out and around London for some street photography, being lighter and more discreet than his Nikon D800. For someone who enjoys street photography in the capital, he hasn't had too many bad experiences with his camera.

Sean says that it can be difficult trying to take photos outside the Shell Centre on the Southbank, but that his experiences with the police have been positive. 'Every 5 November I go along to the Operation Vendetta march from Trafalgar Square to Parliament Square and there’s always a load of police to make sure the event goes off without any trouble. They never ask you to stop taking photos, and will even stop and let you take their picture, sometimes alongside a protestor!'

As for his dream shoot, that's an easy answer: 'Antarctica! I’ve always wanted to go, and these days it's become a more of a possibility, even though it’s still expensive. If I win the lottery then that’s where I’ll be going with my camera.' Although, if he doesn't win the lottery, he'll aim for San Francisco or Seattle.

Many congratulations to Sean, and our thanks for taking the time to talk with us. You can see his winning image 'in bigness' (as my father would have it) at the Sony World Photography Awards exhibition at Somerset House, London, from 1 to 18 May 2014. Sean is particularly looking forward to seeing winner of the Smile category, by Alpay Erdem, and the winner of the Korean National Award by Dowon Choi. Otherwise, you can see more of Sean's work on his Flickr stream.

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!

Is Flickr 3.0 for iOS and Android on its way?

So this just appeared in my Feedly feed:

And when I clicked through to read the article, I encountered this:

Which implies that a major update to Flickr for mobile is imminent, but that somehow, someone got the blog post announcements a little out-of-synch.

Flickr's mobile apps underwent massive, and much-needed, over-hauls in August and December 2012 for Android and iOS respectively, while there was a significant upgrade to the iOS app's camera and editing function in August last year. Meanwhile, the desktop version underwent a significant redesign in May last year and has seen a new photo-page launch over the past six months.

What Flickr 3.0 for mobile holds, I don't know. But I have to say, I'm quite excited to see where it's going!

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.

From 0 to 200 million users in 3.5 years. Instagram, of course.

From a Foursquare-like check-in app that wasn't really going anywhere to a photo-sharing site holding very nearly 20 billion images via a Facebook buy-out worth $1 billion, Instagram announced today that it's surpassed 200 million users. Or rather, it thanked its users in a blog post for making Instagram great. As a quick reminder, here's how far it has come:

October 2010: Instagram launches December 2010: Instagram clocks one million users (yes, it only took three months) September 2011: 11 months and 10 million users, and it's still iOS only April 2012: 1 million users sign up for the Android version of the app in the space of 24 hours March 2014: Instagram announces it has 200 million users, 50 million of whom signed up within the past six months

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?

Know the rules so that you can break them properly

Rules. They're pretty important. Can you imagine trying to get anywhere without some rules for the road? No one would know when to stop, when to go, or even where to go. It'd be chaos, and not my idea of fun. They provide us with a framework, a means of understanding how things work, which enables us to get from A to B more safely. Then there are photography's rules. They aren't quite so critical to everyone's navigational competence and safety—the rule of thirds will hardly prevent me from getting run over—but they are there to make pictures look better.

Breaking them properly

If having rules and laws and dos and do-nots seems terribly restrictive to a creative pursuit (or how fast you want to ride your motorbike), remember that if you know and understand them properly and put them into practice, it gives you one up on anyone who doesn't. In fact, it gives you two up on people who follow them blindly. When you know them properly, you know when you can break them successfully, too.

Make sure your horizons are level...

The power in breaking a rule comes from understanding why it's a rule in the first place. When you know how and why something works, you also understand its limitations and restrictions. This means that you know when you need to reverse it, to stand it on its head, or to smash it altogether in order to get the effect that you want.

...except when they're definitely not.

This works better with an example.

Plain versus creative backgrounds

If you want to show off your subject optimally, you're best to use a plain background. That's a fairly obvious photographic rule. A busy background will compete for attention with your subject and your eye will struggle to focus where it should be focusing. The type of plain background that you use has its own set of rules that goes with it: black makes colours bolder, white makes them duller, complementary colours are striking, and using the same colour background as your subject can look stunning, too. But you know that the rule is a plain background will serve your subject best.

Nothing else to distract from gorgeous Sheara

Except...

When you need to provide some context for your subject. Photographing an academic against a plain background might make for a lovely portrait, but it doesn't really convey who this person is or what she does. Photographing her in her study, surrounded by her books, would be much more meaningful. What's important here is that the background isn't cluttered or confusing. You need the eye to fall on the professor, but the books to relay who she is.

This background helps to show the context in which the photo was taken, however busy it is

Of course, if you're photographing something like a riot or a protest, the chaos and the confusion needs to come over in the picture. You'll need a point of focus for the eye to fall upon, but everything swirling around it will add to the story.

So you want to be a rebel with a cause?

Photography is full of rules. Which means that understanding them properly presents you with hundreds, thousands of opportunities to break them to creative effect. Rather helpfully, Haje combined lots rules and examples of when and how to break them into one rather awesome book: The Rules of Photography and When to Break Them.

Even better, Rules is currently only £4.99 if you download it from the swish looking Ilex Instant site. That's half-price! This means you can read all the rules and learn how to break them. Go on, be a rebel!