Africa Knows is run by Sheila Ochugboju and Joshua Wanyama and their aim with the site is to “tell a different story about Africa” through the lens of Africans – different to the story portrayed by international media.  (Ref: Africa Knows).

Currently most photos on Africa Knows are from Kenya, but according to the site owners the site will grow to include photos from all the diverse countries in Africa.

The photos are divided into 8 categories:

• Sacred Stories
• Stories about Us
• Stories of our Challenges
• Stories of our Dreams
• Stories of our Land
• Stories of our Laughter
• Stories of our Nightmares
• Stories of our Triumphs.

Some of the photos are indeed accompanied by stories, poems or facts, but the photos are of such an excellent quality that they tell the stories on their own.

It was a real treat to browse the photos, and the project is a brilliant demonstration of the power of citizen photojournalism. See for yourself at AfricaKnows.com.

Photos of fungi from a walk near Fittleworth.

The website launched with the slogan “the European window for talented photographers” on 10 November and modestly declares itself “the best photo projects [sic]“.

The site’s annual registration fee for photographers is currently high enough to make me wonder, if you wouldn’t be better off having your own website designed. Although with the backing of the Italian Professional Photographers Association, Tau Visual, you’d assume your photos will enjoy considerable exposure (no pun intended), which can be hard to create on your own website.

I’m under no illusion that my photography in any way can be described as talent, so I won’t be signing up. I will however be checking the site from time to time, as I do enjoy good photography. The site could be a bit more user-friendly, though. I find horizontal scrolling and opening of new windows particularly annoying.

However some of the photos were worth the annoyance, I especially liked the XENART collection by Marco Scataglini, the trees and landscape collections by Mario Donadoni and the acquatica collecion by Patrizia Savarese.

So if you have talent or just want to see photos by talented European photographers, head on over to photographerspro.eu.

Less than two weeks ago yet another service, rsizr, was added to the long list of online photo editing services, but this one is a bit different. rsizr allows you to crop and scale your photos like the other services, but it also allows you to resize your photos using seam carving, a new, smarter way of resizing.

Normally when you resize a photo, you make everything in the photo smaller. With seam carving, however, your photo gets analysed in order to identify the key areas of your photo. As the photo is being resized the less important areas are removed, leaving more room for the key areas in the final photo.

Seam carving sounded rather hocus-pocus to me at first, but rsizr makes child’s play of using this new technology with its retarget function. I uploaded the photo of a spider that I published a few days back, adjusted a few sliders, waited while rsizr created the seams and then dragged the photo to the size I wanted.

Here is the result:

The original photo prior to retargeting:

The photo after retargeting:

I then tried to achieve a similar resize by using two more traditional methods, scaling without maintaining proportions and cropping.

The photo after scaling without maintaining proportions:

The photo cropped to the same size:

As you can tell from the photos above, scaling without maintaining proportions unsurprisingly distorted the photo, whereas cropping the photo to the desired size meant losing more of the spider than was the case with retargeting.

Have a play with rsizr, it really is quite amazing what you can achieve with retargeting. If you want to learn more about seam carving Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir, the people behind the technique, have put together a video that explains it all.