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We've just posted a gallery of real-world samples from the MX-1 - Pentax's flagship compact camera. Announced earlier this year the MX-1 offers a 12MP backlit CMOS sensor, and a fast F1.8-2.5 lens which spans an equivalent focal range of 28-112mm. We wrote a detailed hands-on preview back in January and we're working on putting the camera through our usual gamut of studio and real-world testing. For now, we hope you enjoy this small gallery of samples which - if nothing else - proves that the sun does occasionally come out in Seattle. 

Picture desk live: The Guardian's award-winning picture team rounds up the most eye-catching images of the day

Ranjit DhaliwalMee-Lai Stone

Engineers have developed a curved camera designed to mimic insects' compound eyes. The hemispherical design gives a wide field-of-view with no aberrations and effectively infinite depth-of-field, with the hope it could be used in applications such as endoscopy or as visual sensors on unmanned aircraft. The current design uses 180 light-sensitive elements, each behind its own lens, but researchers hope to build one with 20,000 elements, giving a similar resolution to that seen by dragonflies.

While improvements in camera phone technology have more of us relying on 'the camera that's always with you' than ever before, we're printing our photographs less and less. If you have fond memories of pasting your memories into photo albums, don't despair - a growing crop of apps now make it easy to send your photos from phone to frame using online printing services. In this article, we've gathered eight of the top apps for printing your photos, and examined the results. Click through to read our findings on connect.dpreview.com.

The Finnish smartphone manufacturer Nokia has made a $20 million investment in Pelican Imaging - known for its consumer imaging technology that features a grid of lenses to allow for post-capture focusing. This has spurred rumors about the technology possibly being applied in upcoming Nokia smartphone models. In theory, this could add similar functionality to that offered by Lytro in its innovative light field cameras. Click through to connect.dpreview.com for more details.

Want to cut a dash in South Africa's townships? You'd better have money to burn, says Jonathan Clayton

Phillip Toledano's portraits of people who have undergone extensive cosmetic surgery

Hannah Booth

From escalators to rivers: your best pictures on this week's theme, crossings

Guardian readers

From Rena Effendi's portraits from the most polluted areas of the former Soviet Union to Katie Patterson's cosmic installation in Coventry, find out what's happening in art around the country

Skye SherwinRobert Clark

Research proves how much the master's works have faded since the 1880s, plus Oz art goes walkabout, rubber ducks and Fourth Plinth cock-ups – all in your favourite weekly art roundup

Exhibition of the week: David Batchelor – Flatlands

This artist of found colour has an eye for neon greens and shiny reds in the unlikeliest places, such as goods trolleys. His installations and sculptures rejoice in the arbitrary beauty of the modern world. In this exhibition, another layer to his art is revealed – for the first time, it surveys his paintings and drawings.
• Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, from 4 May until 14 July

Other exhibitions this week

Ellen Gallagher
In Ellen Gallagher's Bird in Hand, a fantastical pirate poses among early-Rothkoesque swirls in a meditation on the slave trade – just one of the beguiling works in this show.
• Tate Modern, London SE1, until 1 September

Garry Fabian Miller
Eerie photographic images of the place where empty sky meets empty sea, in the first complete showing of this series of near-abstract pictures of sea horizons begun in 1976.
• Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, until 13 July

Alexander Calder
The mobiles of this ingenious American are surrealist, and abstract, and highlights of the 20th century.
• Pace Gallery, London W1S, until 7 June

Jutta Koether
Dense, knotty abstract paintings by an artist who churns contemporary subject matter into pungent labyrinths.
• Arnolfini, Bristol, from 4 May until 7 July

Masterpiece of the week

Mark Rothko, Untitled (c1950-2)
The layers of varied yellow over a pinkish veil in this painting reveal Rothko's acute gift for colour. It was a passion he struggled with, as his sensual talent conflicted with his bleak view of the universe. In this powerful work he is an abstract Vincent van Gogh, sharing his soul through bright yet painful chromatic brilliance.
• Tate Modern, London SE1

Image of the week What we learned this week

That Van Gogh's true colours were much brighter than we've ever imagined – new research shows how much his paints have faded

Australia's most treasured art is going walkabout to the UK

There's been a giant cock-up on Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth

An artist is taking a mega inflatable rubber duckie on a world tour – latest stop, Hong Kong harbour

That it's 50 years since the Profumo Affair – and Christine Keeler's nude photograph is still as subversive as ever

That One World Trade Centre could soon become the biggest building in the west – though it's wind, and a spire logistics committee, dependent

What the future of travel could look like – nuclear trains and Jetsons-esque cars

And finally …

Share your art on the theme of home now

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• Painting
• Photography
• Art

Jonathan Jones
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A photographic highlight selected by the picture desk. Harry Todd's photograph of the Skylon being raised for the Festival of Britain was shot at an extreme upward angle, utilising graphic lines in the constructivist fashion

Karin Andreasson

Passion and creativity are two words that are often used when discussing the beautiful game. Here's a Benfica fan who embodies those two qualities

Steven Bloor

William Eggleston, Kitra Cahana and the Pulitzer prize and Robert Capa Gold Medal winners all feature in May's guide to the best photography around the world

Jim PowellAntonio Olmos

Detailed images on a Chinese blog may reveal more about the next-generation Olympus PEN. Although no official announcement has been made, the extent of the leaks about the camera make its existence an open secret. Rumors suggest the camera will be called the E-P5, and suggest it will have Wi-Fi capabilities (both of which seem plausible, based on the company's naming scheme and recent industry trends).

Mike Brodie spent five years riding freight trains across America, returning with an astonishing visual record of the teenage 'freighthoppers' that travel the USA illegally, by rail. Brodie had no formal training in photography, but began documenting his experiences after finding a discarded Polaroid camera behind a car seat. Brodie's images are collected in his new book 'A Period of Juvenile Prosperity'. Click through for more details and a selection of images.

Picture desk live: The Guardian's award-winning picture team rounds up the most eye-catching images of the day

Picture DeskRanjit Dhaliwal

Adobe product manager Tom Hogarty yesterday offered a tantalizing sneak peek into future Lightroom functionality. On Scott Kelby's web show, The Grid, Hogarty demoed an iOS app that allows a wide range of raw file edits on the iPad that can sync back to your Lightroom catalog. Click through to watch it in action on connect.dpreview.com.

Online archive of more than 2m books, documents, photographs and artworks from all over US now available to view for free

Gold paint glowing, there's an illuminated manuscript page from The Book of Hours, dated 1514. A gruelling photograph of the standoff between strikers and militia at the Bread and Roses strike of 1912 in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Black men marching, protesting against segregation in downtown Atlanta in 1960. Extraordinary accounts of the lives of Native Americans during the 19th century. The Digital Public Library of America has just launched, gathering together more than 2m items – books, photographs, manuscripts, art – from the country's libraries, archives and museums, and making them available to the public online for free. It's as if, a member of its steering committee said as the library opened its virtual doors late in April, "the ancient library of Alexandria had met the modern world wide web and digitised America for the benefit of all".

The DPLA has been in the works for the past two years. A non-profit initiative, it has received millions of dollars of funding to digitise and bring together online the collections of the US's great libraries, as well as pieces and texts from regional museums and archives. "One of the best things which people are discovering is that we have brought together lots of very small collections," says Dan Cohen, executive director, who joined the project from a role as director of the Roy Rosenzweig Centre for history and new media at George Mason University. "Yes, we have hundreds of thousands of items from the Smithsonian … but we've also worked with, for example, a historical society from Red Wing, Minnesota, who have amazing images of one of the first hot air balloon flights. It's completely fascinating – it's enabling people to find really incredible local history."

The DPLA has also just announced a new partnership with the David Rumsey map collection, adding tens of thousands of historical maps and images to its online archive, from an 1833 "Eagle" map of the US, showing an eagle "sitting atop the nation", to an early 19th-century map giving the first accurate depiction of the relationship of the sources of the Missouri, the sources of the Columbia and the Rockies. "It has everything from medieval diagrammes to very modern material," says Cohen.

There are "millions of objects in the pipeline" to add to the 2.4m currently online, with "service hubs" around the country aggregating material from smaller places. "We are in a growth phase and as quickly as we can we will expand out the library," Cohen says. "But we want to make sure all the metadata is very rigorous."

The main issue the DPLA is facing is copyright – just as Google did when it was sued by authors and publishers for its plans to digitise millions of books for Google Book Search, including in-copyright titles.

"Copyright is the biggest point of friction right now," according to Cohen, "particularly for certain kinds of things like books, where everything before 1923 is in the public domain, and from 1923 on you start running into barriers."

Cohen is working together with scholar, author and Harvard University librarian Robert Darnton, a key member of the DPLA's committee, to solve the issue. "One of the things Bob and I are both really interested in is are there some creative ways we can think of getting more … books into the public sphere," says Cohen. "We want authors and publishers to make money, but the vast majority of books make most of their money in the first five years, then sit in copyright for the next 100 years. We think there might be creative ways to get more of those authors into the public sphere."

One of these options could be an "authors' alliance", where the author receives their rights back from the publisher after a certain amount of time, and can donate them to the DPLA if they want. "Or a 'library licence', where a book could be under standard copyright protection for a certain period of time set by the publisher, five or 10 or 15 years, and after that the DPLA would get a gift of a single ebook copy, and we could host a version."

"We want to have a variety of methods so publishers and authors can feel more confident about saying 'we are going to recoup our costs', but provision for the fact that we don't need to lock stuff down until 2118, when we'll all be on Mars … But these are conversations which have just started, and there may be other creative ways of doing things," says Cohen. "There needs to be some sort of balance. It is a lot healthier to have a nation of voracious readers who sometimes get their reading material for free either through their libraries or the DPLA, than a nation of TV watchers."

In the meantime, Cohen is "really curious" to see how people interact with the DPLA and the millions of items it already has to show. "I've already got messages from teachers who have integrated it into their classrooms [and] we also view the DPLA as a technology platform others can build on. We have a growing app library where the material can be used, for instance to create a mobile app to access the local history around you," he says. "We are 100% open. You can download the DPLA and do with it what you want."

• Libraries
• Poetry
• Photography
• Art
• Heritage
• United States

Alison Flood
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Young photographers dispel negative stereotypes with experimental images of Brazzaville's urban landscapes

They are young. They are skilled. They are fed up with the dark narrative international media keep reporting on their region. Génération Elili, which means the generation of the image in Lingala language, is a photographer collective born a few years ago in Brazzaville with the desire to see Congolese taking part in the building of their history. From urban jungles to deep forests, from disused shipyards to decaying railways they tell new stories and prove that creative photography is possible anywhere.

Documenting the city

Looking at Génération Elili's work in their gallery of Bacongo, a vibrant neighbourhood of Brazzaville, or browsing their occasional exhibitions in town, one is struck by the diversity of techniques and approaches. Urban documentary photography takes a fair share of the attention. Works such as Baudouin Mouanda's, a founding member of the collective, evoke the life of students at night. "Streets are a second home for them" says Mouanda. "There they can hang out together, meet new people and dream of rosy futures."

Some use photography to shed light on social problems. With her Coupé-Coupé series, Khelly Manou de Mahoungou documents the phenomenon of low-cost meat that is increasingly popular in the streets of Brazzaville and Kinshasa, in neighbouring DRC. To get around rising food prices, growing numbers of Congolese buy their meat from informal eateries, where quality control never occurs. A plate of "coupé-coupé" costs about the sixth of a kilo of fresh meat, and the choice is swiftly made.

Others prefer not to tell particular stories. They show the city as it comes to them: enormous, sprawling, ebullient craters where the lives of millions collide in the never-ending traffic jams. Add to this cocktail the absence of street lighting at night and you obtain the perfect hunting ground for photographers with a liking for urban landscape. Émilie Wattelier, a French woman based in Brazzaville, finds beauty in these dark atmospheres. "An African city on the equator line… The night falls early and at once… In this shade, one passes by ghostly silhouettes… At night, all the places are the same…" she writes as a label for her work.

Finding new ways

Others are experimental. In Elsewhere – a view from Elsewhere, Richard Goma superimposes parallel universes: nature and cities. The result is troubling, images of garbage surmounting pristine canopies or cars lost in dense forests. "My work is a call to urban planners: they should consider the benefits of nature in their work. Flora is essential to fight against erosion or to give oxygen to our cities" he says. Goma's work suggests a nagging problem: in Congo as in other parts of the world, massive urbanisation and poor urban planning have devastating effects on human health and the environment.

In a complete different aesthetic, Francis Kodia presents a reflection on shipwrecks. There, among rusted carcasses or in humid containers, he meets a strange fauna: tramps looking for a temporary shelter, welders trying to fix what can be fixed, scrap merchants having just found their new El Dorado. Through the poetry of his work, Kodia wants to raise awareness. "The shipyard has destroyed our landscape" he explains. "And one must not forget that these shipwrecks massively pollute the river with significant leaks of oil and chemicals."

Finally, Génération Elili counts daydreamers in its ranks. Arnaud Makalou, the artistic director of the collective, just finished a work where he uses railways as a mean to wander about in the country. "Railways link extremities together. Few people are aware of it, but railways are built for humanity to send itself messages." Along Congolese decayed rail lines, Makalou encounters the country's people – ageing seasonal workers, voluptuous women, mischievous boys – and discovers incredible landscapes.

Passing on creativity

Promoting contemporary artistic creation in their country has become a cornerstone of Génération Elili's activities. Over the years, the collective has significantly matured. Today, it counts about 20 active members who have developed several partnerships and captured the attention of some big names of world photography. Hector Mediavilla and Philippe Guionie, two major contemporary documentary photographers, and Philippe Moison, renowned for his portraits, have all supported the collective by giving master-classes.

In a Congolese society often cast by external commentators as docile and passive, Elili aims to plant a seed that will keep growing. "Everything started from emulation. Years ago, five of us had the chance to attend photography classes sponsored by a cooperation program. After this training, they started to teach others and the collective was born" says Arnaud Makalou. "Today we want to repeat that story. We work with orphans, teaching them the techniques of photography, encouraging them to show their own perception of reality. It is not only about technical skills. We want them to be artistically aware."

Hadrien Diez is a freelance cultural journalist based in Nairobi

• Congo Brazzaville
• Democratic Republic of the Congo
• Photography
• Africa
• Art

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A photographic highlight selected by the picture desk. Bill Brandt was one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. He was born on this day in 1904 in Germany, and moved to Britain in 1933 where he began to document British society. His documentary work, portraiture and studies of nudes exemplified what he himself termed 'a sense of wonder', to make people see the world anew. This portrait was commissioned by Picture Post.

Jim Powell