Choose an image from the portfolio, they said. And so I trawled, imagining I might be a client, a commissioner, challenging the drop-down menus to find me a photographer I might write about.

That single thumbnail has to do so much. The viewer needs to be curious enough to click through to the portfolio and then, hopefully, onto a website or Flickr page.

For this month's Meet a Redeye member we catch up with John Merrill.

How did you get into photography?

What struck me immediately about Peter Mearns' image was the structural similarity to Velazquez’s Las Meninas, painted more than 400 years ago. We have an image divided into three distinct ‘bands’ or ‘grounds’ - foreground, middleground and background.

For this month's Meet a Redeye Member we catch up with Jan Fyfe.

How did you get into photography?

I have been interested in photography since my teenage years and dabbled in a number of short photographic courses in my early 20s. Photography then took a back seat until 10 years ago when I went back to college to do a basic photo course and became hooked once more. I followed this with an A Level, a BA and then an MA in 2011. I am presently studying for a practice-led PhD at MMU.

The act of photographing the same place at different points in time is referred to as rephotography. It is particularly associated with the Rephotographic Survey project that was conceived by the American photographer Mark Klett. Klett’s project was ambitious as he and a team of photographers retraced the steps of the nineteenth century government survey team that had photographed the grand landscapes of the American West. Time was sandwiched between two images, one taken in the past and one in the present.

In her second personal reflection on this year's Arles Rencontres, Rebecca Dearden reflects on scale and size, focusing on the Manchester-based Roast Beef collective.

Emma Freeman won the 2012 Redeye Printing Bursary with Rob Sara, awarded to one Redeye member whose work would benefit from master printing. Here Rob and Emma reflect on what happened after the bursary was awarded, and the route the pair decided to take to print the project.

Guest opinion:
Bertrand Lavédrine, Director of the Centre de Recherche sur la Conservation des Collections (CRCC), CNRS, MNHN, MCC, Paris, France, outlines the latest research on the effect of lighting while preserving photographs.