The popularity of digital photography shows no sign of fading, and people seem to want their cameras ever more complicated. The fastest-growing market sector is digital SLRs: Britons bought 125,000 of these professional-style models last Christmas, 60% up on the previous year. The internet can help us take better pictures, manipulate them on computers and share them online.

1 Flickr.com

One of the first photo-sharing websites, Flickr is now five years old and houses more than 3 billion pictures. A basic account is free and offers some useful ways to organise and share your photos, either via invitation, for the eyes of family and friends only, or with the whole world.

2 Photo.net

With more than 700,000 shutterbugs as members, you should be able to get advice on pretty much anything photographic in

the busy forums. The gallery section, meanwhile, provides some useful inspiration — although the emphasis is on over-polished, postcard views.

3 digital-photography-school.com

This virtual school, run by keen amateur lensmen, is particularly strong on the dark arts of postproduction. See also www.photoshop.com, a companion site to the industry-standard retouching software.

4 SmugMug.com

This is where the pros go when they’ve outgrown Flickr. Subscription starts at $39.95 (£24.50) a year, but the advantages of this photo-sharing site include no ads, unlimited storage and no limit on the size of shots.

5 photography.alltop.com

Alltop is basically a portal that accumulates links from blogs, news and magazine sites on any subject you care to name. Its photography pages are littered with hundreds of good links. Brilliant, random fun.

6 Photobucket.com

This is where millions of us quietly store our pictures online without even realising it, as it’s the place where MySpace and Facebook images are filed. It’s also a photo-sharing rival to Flickr.

7 OutdoorPhotographer.com

A great place to swot up on tips for shooting outdoors. The galleries of the professionals here are mesmerising, and keen snappers can enter the site’s competitions.

8 Corbis.com

Corbis is a photo agency that sells pictures to newspapers and other media, but if you’re looking for inspiration, its powerful search engine will grab the work of hundreds of professionals in seconds.

9 BW.amitbasu.org

How to choose from the hundreds of photographers’ blogs? Amit Basu’s site is a good start: he posts a new luminous, eerie, black-and-white shot most days, with some technical detail available.

10 Photography.NationalGeographic.com

No magazine takes its photography more seriously than National Geographic, and its site dedicated to the art is a real labour of love. The video guides alone will help you see your camera in a different way.

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