Open for entries: the 2014 Sony World Photography Awards

The 2014 incarnation of the Sony World Photography Awards, run by the World Photography Organisation (WPO), is now open for entries from professional, amateur, student, and young photographers. Prizes range from $25,000 for the winner of L'Iris d'Or, the overall winner of the professional competition, to new equipment from Sony for all category winners.

There are 15 categories in the professional competition, ten in the open competition, the youth competition is for photographers aged under 20, whilst the student competition is for students of photography studying in higher education aged between 18 and 30.

The professional competition is judged on a series of images from the same body of work that was completed or first published in 2013. Series must comprise between three and ten images and you can enter as many categories as you want, but you can't submit the same series to multiple categories. As for the categories, you can choose from: architecture, arts and culture, campaign, contemporary issues, current affairs, fashion & beauty, landscape, lifestyle, nature & wildlife, people, portraiture, sport, still life, and travel.

Basic members of the WPO are eligible to enter up to three photographs for free, submitted into one category or spread across multiple categories of the open competition. Categories comprise: architecture, arts and culture, enhanced, low-light, nature and wildlife, panoramic, people and places, smile, split second, and travel.

There are three categories for the youth competition—culture, environment, or portraits—and entrants can submit between three and 20 images across the categories.

As for the closing dates: the open and youth competitions close at 23:59 GMT on Monday 6 January 2014 and the professional competition closes at 23:59 GMT on Thursday 9 January 2014.

Should the student focus competition interest you, the brief is to shoot a single image for the front page of a newspaper. Style doesn't matter but content does: the aim is to draw attention to an issue that's significant to you. Entries need to be submitted by 6 December 2013.

All of the information detailing how to enter, the Rules, and more on the prizes can be found on the WPO website.

Instagram's made it to Android. Now what?

How the feed looks

Instagram - the dastardly easy photo-sharing app - has been a darling of the iPhoneography community since its launch in October 2010. It had over one million subscribers within a month and two million within six weeks, all snapping photos, applying filters, and sharing them with the world via a live stream. Now, it has in excess over 30 million subscribers and over 5 million photos are uploaded every day. But anyone with an Android phone couldn't join in the fun because there wasn't an Android app. All the fun was reserved for iPhone-owners. Until today, that is, when Instagram launched its Android version. At last, anyone with a camera-phone running Android 2.2 or above with support for OpenGL ES 2 can download the app, for free, and start snapping and sharing.

If you're wondering just how left-out the Android crowd were feeling, there were over 430,000 people who'd signed up to the Instagram-for-Android waiting list.

Whether this is just people jumping on a bandwagon or they are genuinely excited to be able to share snippets of their days photographically, it doesn't really matter. The numbers are incredible. All of Instagram's numbers are incredible.

The same team who built the app for iOS also worked on the Android incarnation, with the intention of making the experience as similar as possible between the two platforms. Although there are a couple of features missing from the Android version that are extant on the iOS version (Tilt Shift/Blur, Share from Feed, Live Preview and Share to Flickr), they should be coming soon; but the filters and the community are the same. There're no features on the Android app that aren't on the iOS version, and this is something that Instagram intends to maintain.

So apart from ironing out a few kinks in the system and bringing the Android app completely up to speed, where next for Instagram? They're being pretty reticent about the future: 'We have nothing to announce at this time, but we are always actively considering ways to expand Instagram's utility to everyone in the world.' That could mean bringing it to other phones, but it could also mean making an app suitable for all those millions of beautiful tablets that are sliding their ways into people's bags and onto their coffee tables. Wouldn't that make sense?

Wherever Instagram goes next, I can't see it being in a hurry - after all, it took over a year to develop a non-iOS app - but if it's even half as eagerly anticipated as the Android version, then the astonishing rise of the photo-sharing app will take another - slow, but carefully placed - step towards social media domination.