How did you author (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
I took this photo on my new iPhone 8 with the rear camera. I tried stay at a distance that I could frame the photo so it was squared nicely around the square doors. I did not need and therefore use a flash for the photo as there was already more than enough light. After taking the shot I added the “Clarendon” filter and dialled it down a bit so it wasn’t too blue, but I didn’t dial it down that much. Other than that I did no editing however. In comparison to other editing software websites the editing process is easy and only takes a few clicks, whereas using other editing apps requires a bit more back-and-forth-ing. I have also noticed over the years that Instagram has increased the editing options in their authoring process, so there isn’t heaps that one can’t do on Instagram that one can on other apps. Well not too many mainstream photo authoring options anyway.
How did you publish (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
I took a few shots before I decided on this photo, as I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be in the reflection or if I wanted the doors to be open or closed. Once I decided to be out of the photo (as much as possible anyway) I settled on this photo pretty quickly. I then added a caption, a location, and 3 hashtags to stay with my formula.
My photo interestingly got 5 likes in just half an hour (I suspect it was the #reflection hashtag that brought the traffic). It’s interesting because my video this week in comparison got very little attention. I think the photo, as opposed to the video, may have a little more of that “Instagrammism” (Manovich, 2016) aesthetic about it, with the photo having a certain filter and sparseness that I think represents that look a little bit more than the video does. I’m not sure whether this photo got more traffic through the quality of the photo or through the different hashtags. The location is the same and so are two of the hashtags, so perhaps it was the “reflections” hashtag. I suspect it was a bit of both, but I think a definite reason is the quality of the photo and the better Instagram aesthetic it has in comparison to the video.
How did you distribute (the photo or video) you published on Instagram to other social media services?
I added this video to Tumblr and to Twitter with very easily. One thing I did notice on Tumblr was that the video doesn’t play automatically like it does on Instagram. You have to physically press play. I think this means that if you really wanting to make it work on Tumblr you would need an affective caption that sums up the video and the cover image of the video must draw people in. While scrolling I don’t think people will want to click play on a random video with a vague caption that doesn’t look interesting, even if it does contain something interesting within the video. I also dislike how Twitter does not show any kind of preview, and as such the descriptions must be interesting to gain any kind of traffic through that platform because you cannot speak to the audience through images like you can on both Instagram and Tumblr.
New phone feels #doors #adoorable #reflection @ RMIT University https://t.co/50V9PPDYxJ
— James (@door_ene) October 3, 2018