“Contemporary media is experienced, created, edited, remixed, organised and shared with software….to understand media today we need to understand media software its genealogy, its anatomy and it’s practical and theoretical effects.”
-Elaine Khoo, 2017, p. 6
I can truthfully say that it has honestly taken me until the third week of capturing doors on my Green Door Spotter Instagram to utilise Instagram in the way that it was intended – and in a way that is most practical to its software.
When taking a photo, my gut instinct is to use the in-built camera app on my iPhone 6. It’s easy, I can take an endless amount of photos (thank you, storage!) and I can later go through and select, favourite, edit and delete photos as I please – a true test to the strengths of digital photography. To physically capture a photo through Instagram itself used to be a foreign and unnatural concept to me. While I can understand and respect the ‘capturing life on the go’ aesthetic, this task has truly tested my ability to step away from other editing applications and my camera app, and trust that the software affordances within Instagram are sufficient. I’ll let you (whoever you are reading this) to be the judge on my efforts, but I think the Green Door Spotter Instagram is a testament to the fact that Instagram is some well-built software, that can be the only application used to author, publish and distribute a photo or video.
This week I utilised Instagram’s “add multiple posts” feature, and captured some green-car doors to mix up my feed, while still complimenting it’s overall theme.
You’ll find my video for this week as the second part of this post, which you can view by scrolling across or by selecting the arrow.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bx9jcCVJPGt/
1. How did you author (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
This video was taken using the rear-facing camera on my iPhone 6 – within the Instagram app itself. As it was quite shadowy due to the sun, I had recorded several takes moving closer and further away from the car, in order to try and capture its green colour. However, the reflection of the sun left the car looking more black than green. To counteract this, I utilised Instagram’s filters within the editing section, specifically the filter nashville which has a green-tinge to it. Within Manovich’s work within Instagram and the Contemporary Image, he suggests that “Instagram filters enabled people to make “bad’ photos look “good” (Manovich, 2016, p.41). This is something which rings true for my video work. While I believe the actual capturing of the car is okay, without Instagram’s filters and editing software, the colour of the car door would not look as green – and this become irrelevant and actually take away from my Instagram account as appose to adding to it. Manovich also suggests in his reading that Instagram users copy how different objects should be photographed by creating expectations on the authoring process. This is certainly something which has played on my mind throughout this process, especially in regards to how I’ve seen popular ways to frame things on Instagram, which I often subconsciously try to replicate.
2. How did you publish (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
This photo was selected out of three short videos that were taken, with each one tracking slightly differently over the green car. After each potential ‘candidate’ was considered, I uploaded my favourite video alongside a photo of a different green car door into a post. The publishing process is where I thought of my caption, in which I used some gentle sarcasm and a range of emojis to ensure the post was eye-catching and colourful – thus matching with the aesthetic choices of my other posts.
3. How did you distribute (the photo or video) you published on Instagram to other social media services?
Like all my other posts, my tumblr account was this post’s primary distributor. Alongside of this I also used several hashtags which formed the basis to dispense this content in channels much wider than my 23 followers. By using quite broad hashtags such as #car or #melbourne (which both have millions of posts), I am attempting to relate my content to a much wider audience, and give it a much wider channel to sit. Using my personal hashtag #greendoorspotter also helps my distribution on a personal level. As all my posts use the same hashtag (which for user-convenience is my Instagram handle), if someone clicks on that hashtag they will find a collection of all my content in the one place, and may be more inclined to engage with my profile.
Khoo E, Hight C, Torrens R, Cowie B 2017, ‘Introduction: Software and other Literacies’ in Software Literacy: Education and Beyond, Springer, Singapore, pp.1-12.