Updates in the Independent app this week: from photography to giants

It was this newspaper’s record-breaking Christmas Appeal for Space for Giants – the charity implementing the Giants Club initiative – in 2013 that gave fresh international attention to African conservation

Elephants at a waterhole in Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. The country is stepping up efforts to reduce poaching and eradicate the illegal ivory trade (Rex)

From the beginning, as readers of the app will know better than most, The Independent has been committed to world-class photography. One of the ways in which we pushed back the frontiers of journalism after we were founded in 1986 was by using bigger, better and often black-and-white photography, especially of foreign climes and events, to tell our stories. This quickly caught on, with other newspapers following our lead by devoting more space and bigger budgets to beautiful images.

Johnnie Shand Kydd’s remarkable pictures from the inaugural Giants Club summit in Kenya at the end of April are in keeping with this tradition. The Giants Club is an initiative that brings together business, government, and conservationists to preserve Africa’s very endangered elephants and rhinos. At the first event, nearly two months ago on the outskirts of Nairobi, the presidents of Kenya, Uganda and Gabon made a series of concrete pledges to stop the ivory trade. They also attended the biggest ivory burn in history, which was designed to send a message about their intent.

Johnnie’s pictures, which show the slaughter in all its brutality and also capture the characters who are combating the trade, form a wonderful exhibition of the inaugural summit and its context. I think the range that we’ve selected, which you can see in today’s Magazine, show both the urgency of this fight, and the compassion of the local forces who are on its frontline. The haunting visage of the animals is matched by the quiet heroism of the rangers dressed in khaki suits that you helped to pay for. After all, it was this newspaper’s record-breaking Christmas Appeal for Space for Giants – the charity implementing the Giants Club initiative – in 2013 that gave fresh international attention to African conservation, and out of which the events chronicled by Johnnie came.

The beauty of digital technology means not only that you can see the images in very high resolution but that you can pinch and pull those images on your iPad to zoom in on them. From the emails I’ve been getting over the past few weeks, this new feature has been a revelation to many of you, as it has to me. Head over to the Magazine to see what you make of the selection we’ve got in today.

And if you want another feature that’s familiar and true to The Independent, I’m delighted to say that our Weather page is back by popular demand. As you’ll see, it very closely resembles the page we had in the newspaper. So that’s another way in which, as I know I’ve been banging on about for weeks now, The Independent Daily Edition that you’re reading is a worthy custodian of the very best of its printed predecessor. Happy Saturday.