How did you author photo you recorded for upload to Instagram?
This week our attention turned to authoring, publishing and distributing our own content on Instagram. Instagram is an app which many of us have been using for years to connect with friends, family and content creators who align with our aesthetic or values. And I wanted to try and reflect my prior knowledge in this post.
For this week’s photo I decided to get into the Mother’s Day spirit and asked my mum if I could take a photo of her in front of her favourite doorway in the house. She chose the front door of her home. In order to record this photograph I used the camera inside Instagram for the first time ever because I wanted to experiment a little. I have to say I didn’t like it at all because you can only take one image before Instagram prompts you to edit the photograph. I like recording multiple photographs before deciding on which one is best.
So, I switched back to the camera on my iPhone SE, took multiple photos then picked the best photo inside the Instagram app. I used the smallest grid Instagram offers to ensure the symmetry of my photograph was perfect and adjusted accordingly, to fit the Instagram square. Once I had cropped it correctly, I increased lux to make the colours pop, I turned brightness down slightly and colour graded the image shadows blue to give it a cool tone.
How did you publish the photo or you recorded for upload to Instagram?
I published the image on Instagram to my new account and it was the first photo so it looks very out of place. I published it with a caption which reads “Mum’s favourite doorway. Happy Mother’s Day for Sunday!”, with a star-eyes emoji. After I published the image, I added the hashtags #home, #village, #melbourne, #mum in the comments and then the next day added #mothersday and #happymothersday.
I authored and publish this image in line with Mother’s day on the 12th of May, because I wanted the content on this account to go beyond being a stagnant assignment. I want this account to entwine with the real world and respond to events and interact with my friends and family in the same way a real instagram account does. I think this will help the account reflect the connective, creative and social environment of Instagram, which has inspired people to be creative when capturing everyday moments through the lens of their iPhone (Manovich, 2016, p. 12).
How did you distribute (the photo or video) you published on Instagram to other social media services?
To distribute this photograph I used the Melbourne geotag, which allows the image to be seen by anyone on Instagram who searches for and looks through the Melbourne geotag. The hashtags I used, which I mentioned earlier, have been used in the same way, so that the image can be seen by any Instagram user who has searched for and is looking through the hashtag. I used the Mother’s Day hashtag to do just this as Mother’s Day is approaching, which means there would be traffic. These are both ways of distributing the image I authored and published to people who are not following me and allowing them to engage with the image.
I also distributed my image to Tumblr, but not through the Instagram app. Once I had exported the Instagram image, I uploaded it into the Tumblr app which encouraged me to edit the image, however I has already done this through Instagram so there was no need. Due to the constraints of the Tumblr app I deleted the caption because it broke up my blog page but kept the hashtags, which need to be entered separately due to the format of the software. I also added the hashtags #doorway, #favourite, #boho and #mother.
I posted straight to Twitter from Instagram and the hashtags translated across so it was all very easy. This week my use of Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter showed me that Instagram and Twitter are more compatible than Instagram and Tumblr are. I also feel that my content doesn’t match the format of Tumblr in the same way it does matches Twitter. It has made me realise that both Instagram and Twitter can be used as Manovich said, in a way to capture everyday life through the camera lens on your phone (Manovich, 2016, p. 12). This is in contrast to Tumblr which, I believe, is a much more highly curated, post-production driven site weighted more towards artistic photography rather than the everyday posting and strong connection to immediate friends and family that Instagram boasts.
My Instagram photo distributed on Twitter:
My Instagram photo on my Tumblr Blog
And finally how the image looks on the Tumblr site
References:
Manovich, L 2016, Instagram and the Contemporary Image, University of San Diego, USA, pp.9-18