Picture 1
This is the first image I posted, which started the theme of this part of Assignment 3. After leaving a lecture for Networked Media, I noticed this glass door, with an opaque gradient created from the light. The different levels of opacity intrigued me, and I snapped a picture of it.
Picture 2
This was the second image I took for my Instagram account, and the third post I made to it. I was traming home along Lygon street and decided that the tram doors applied to both the somewhat see-through and urban aesthetic my account was going for, and decided to snap a picture from my seat
Authoring
For the first image, I lined myself up towards the door, opening the Instagram application, and snapping the picture directly from the camera feature in the post-selection screen, where you have a choice between ‘Gallery’, ‘Camera’, and ‘Video’. I chose to do this to make these images and videos the most ‘Instagram based’ they could be, with everything being done in house. I used the back facing camera of my Samsung S9+, converted through the aforementioned camera software in the Instagram app. I tried to line the borders of the door slightly in the borders of the square of Instagram’s portrait mode dimensions.
For the second image, I captured it from the seat of the tram I was sitting on, leaning slightly over to try and align the beams of the motorised door somewhat in the centre (doesn’t seem to have worked). I again used my Samsung S9+’s back camera through the camera feature of Instagram.
From there, I applied the ‘Inkwell’ filter in the Instagram application but reduced it’s intensity to around 60-80%, giving it a desaturated feel. No other adjustments were made to the images from there.
Publishing
I decided I wanted to title the images in a similar, vague theme. The first one was titled ‘Opaque’ because of how the door’s opacity doesn’t allow you to see clearly through it. The second image was titled ‘Push and Pull’ due to the way the tram doors operate, seemingly pushing and pulling against their gears. I then, as with all other pictures to come, spaced out 5 periods before adding my hashtags.
These images were captured in one take and were the only images I had in mind at the time. I tagged the location of RMIT University for the first, and Brunswick East for the second.
Distribution
For the first image, I used a various abundance of hashtags to distribute my images further than my (at the time) 0 follower fanbase. I decided to go vague, using things like #doors and #desaturated to try and capture an artistic and strange market. Furthermore, I also used more basic and commonly used hashtags such as #melbourne, for broad distribution.
For the second image, I used the same, vague and artsy hashtags as the previous post, but got a little more specific, such as addressing the tram itself with #publictransport and #tram
Doing this seems to have garnered me a large number of likes compared to what I was respected, with the time of this post, both pictures having over 5 likes each. I decided not to share both these images, or the first video post, to other social media sites, to determine if the external distribution would have any effect on the engagement of the profile and their retrospective images.