Attention, amateur photographers and Instagram junkies: TurlockCityNews.com wants your photos.

The new feature Instagram Direct, introduced by the social media photography site Instagram in December, allows users to send pictures straight to a friend or TurlockCityNews.com.

TurlockCityNews.com strives to be anything and everything Turlock, but we can’t be everywhere, all the time. We want our readers to share whenever they see something interesting around town, be it breaking news or simply a casual snapshot.

To send us pictures with Instagram Direct, just tap “Direct” instead of “Followers” when you decide to post a picture. Choose TurlockCityNews in the “To:” box, and it’ll come directly to our phones.

Or, for the old-fashioned type, just add us in a hashtag (#turlockcitynews) to your public photos and we’ll be sure to see them.

For those unfamiliar with Instagram, think of it as a Facebook specifically for photos. The platform allows you to add captions that can include the best and most relevant hashtags for your post, and this instagram hashtag generator can give you a helping hand should you need it. Thinking of it like Facebook shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, given that Facebook bought the service for $1 billion in April 2012.

But the site’s slick interface, nifty app, and sharp focus on photography have garnered more than 150 million monthly users TurlockCityNews.com among them.

TurlockCityNews.com already has more than 1,200 followers on Instagram. And though that’s well below the 9,500-plus who follow us on Facebook, or the more-than-136,000 people who visit our website each month, our Instagram account is very important to us.

As visitors to TurlockCityNews.com already know, we’ve made a commitment to being a photo-focused news agency. Every single story we run has an attached graphic, because we know as well as anyone that a picture is often worth 1,000 words.

Visit TurlockCityNews.com on Instagram at http://instagram.com/turlockcitynews.