Called in to see the exhibition today. Lovely work and good to see them well lit and a reasonable size. Favourite picture was No 1 the waterfall. It has a luminosity that just jumps out of the print. I kept going back to it.

Interesting to see that some were done with the X20 – very impressive. I bought one myself about 4 weeks ago and love using it although I haven’t tried doing anything serious with it yet. As a carry around camera it’s great and is a lot easier to carry than a D300! A small selection of my test pictures is on Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/29093195@N06/sets/72157633336786111/

Look forward to seeing your continuing work.

The home page is too busy and big for me but I might be able to get used to it, but the part that bugs me on the home page is the right hand side bar. I don’t know, it just isn’t helpful and adds too much noise to one page.

I like the photostream page with the full page of tiled images, but it is not quite slick with the top header. I hate the top image and tool/info bar. It’s too chunky.

The part I really dislike is the black background when viewing an image it’s horrible, off putting, amateurish and actually kills black and white images for me. B&W images can leak into it, yuck.

They also have only seem to have changed parts of the site as others still have the look of the old format. For example, when you click on Groups from the home page, you just get the old listed format as before. I guess these might come to change later, or is it just a facial upgrade?

They should have not tried to be 500px or some of the other competition. What is the point of trying to look, be like the competition, how are they going to win people back or away from them when they are offering something that isn’t as slick? They should have tried to be Flickr and come up with something new/better. If they had just taken a bit of the $1.1bn they have wasted on Tumblr and put it into some better designers……..then maybe, just maybe.

In my view it is a fail. It has some good points and some hideous points. They have moved way to close the the competitions look and feel and offer very little to differentiate themselves from a busy market place.

Explore needs a major overhaul…can’t believe some of the mundane crap that gets in there over some far more imaginative and technically accomplished work. It should be somewhere for me to look to find new favourite photographers and images, but it just isn’t.

Yes, there are elements of the change that displease me; there are parts I really like; and there are bits I’m still to figure out. But let’s wait and see before rushing to judgement.

Re the Marissa Meyer quote, I do think she’s been misunderstood there – in part because she expressed herself badly and in part (perhaps the larger part) because yesterday people were content to misunderstand her – it fed their frustrations about the redesign. But she’s apologised on Twitter so let’s move on.