The Graffiti Door Photo
- How did you author (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
I authored this photo with the rear facing camera of my iPhone 7. I find that the iPhone produces fairly decent photo quality which makes taking photographs for Instagram much easier. For this photo in particular I decided to explore the city, looking for interesting, colourful and unique doors. I came across a laneway in Chinatown that had extensive graffiti and a number of graffiti adorned doors. I decided to take the photo through the camera in the Instagram app, as the app itself affords photo taking. In this way, Instagram’s affordances amalgamate the process of authoring, publishing and distributing media onto one platform. Indeed, through utilising this specific affordance of Instagram I discovered how to save drafts of posts which allowed me to take multiple photos. From here I went on to choose the photo I found to be most compelling, which was largely based on framing.
The camera function of the app is also pre-formatted in a square which I consider to be helpful. This is because although Instagram now affords its users to post photos of various dimensions, the photos on one’s feed present themselves in a grid format. Therefore, pre-emptively taking the photograph in square format allowed me to see how it would look in the grid, which is an integral aspect of Instagram. The square aspect of Instagram forced me to frame my photo in a different manner than I would have it been rectangle. Doors themselves are rectangle, therefore I took a few steps back to include the door’s surroundings in order to capture the entire door. I did not want to over edit this photograph, so the only changes I made were to add the ‘aden’ filter and decrease the brightness a bit which made the colours pop.
- How did you publish (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
When it came to publishing the photo I actually drafted the post a number of times. I found myself changing it and adding to it over a few days before I felt like I wanted to post it. For me personally, the draft affordance of Instagram is extremely helpful as I am very indecisive. As I took this image in China Town, I decided to geo-tag China Town, Melbourne. I geotagged this location in the process of publishing, not after. This is because Instagram makes the process of geotagging very simple and obvious in the stage of preparation for upload. I made the decision to geotag this image not only because it will aid in the photograph’s distribution, but because I thought it was useful. This photo was not just taken from my back door; the location was not an afterthought. If someone came across the image they might like to visit the location themselves, which they could easily do by clicking on the geotag.
With the caption for this image, I decided to make it a call to action in a way. I urged viewers to return to my account to find out what was behind the door in my next post. I did this with the intention of gaining followers who might want to see what is behind the door in the next post.
- How did you distribute (the photo or video) you published on Instagram to other social media services?
I used the cross posting affordance of Instagram to instantaneously post the photo across multiple platforms. The publishing page of an Instagram post makes it very easy to publish across multiple platforms at the same time. I simply linked my Twitter and Tumblr accounts and clicked a button, immediately sharing the post on all linked accounts as soon as it was published to Instagram. This mechanism of distribution increases the reach of the post.
Another way I utilised to distribute the photograph was by using hashtags. I used a number of very popular hashtags in my caption in order to further distribute the post, increasing reach and traffic. I also utilised the aforementioned geotag to further distribute the post. Both forms of tagging collate my photo with other photographs so that if an Instagram user were to search the location ‘China Town’ or #graffiti, my post will come up.