https://www.instagram.com/p/CA9E2lsj4Am/

How did you author the photo you recorded for upload to Instagram?

For this week’s photo I captured an image of my cats scratching post, I decided to use this as the object of my photograph after being influenced by this weeks reading by Manovich. In the reading Manovich expresses that simplicity does well on Instagram. With this in mind I decided to theme my Instagram for Networked Media; Minimalist Cat. I knew that having my cat as the focus point would enable me to keep curating content as my cat is always up to new things and adorable to look at photos of. Going back to the idea of simplicity, I wanted to show my cat in a minimalist way, therefore I decided that my content would only focus on one thing at a time. I also decided that my content should stay in a black and white theme, in my opinion this makes things look more professional and somewhat editorial.

I used my iPhone 11 to record this photo and captured it using the application Instagram. Using the Instagram application to take my photo and work from scratch with only this software was a struggle. I have always used other applications like VSCO and Lightroom to edit my photos, Furthermore, I had never taken an original photo with the in-app camera Instagram offers, this is simply because I don’t believe it offers enough variety in terms of its quality and editing tools. I found that authoring my photo through this medium was too constrained. In particular, the editing tolls and the filters available on Instagram made it hard for me to make my posts aesthetically pleasing in the way that popular Instagram accounts do now, most of these account don’t follow how Instagram suggests that one should edit their photos (Manovich, 2016, p13), and instead utilise third party (Manovich, 2016, p12) applications in order to produce their content. For my photo I was able to edit it using a few different tools on Instagram. Firstly I utilised the filter ‘Moon’, this is a black and white filter. Furthermore I adjusted the brightness making it -10 darker as well as adjusted the contrast by -5 in order to create the effect on the photo.

How did you publish the photo you recorded for upload to Instagram

I created a new Instagram account under my RMIT University number “s3601713”, this account I decided would host the entire work from this project, however as this was the first photo on the grid it made the page look extremely empty. The caption I used for this post was “Scratching post”, I wanted my captioned to be as minimalist as possible and decided to be quite literal about them. As the photograph is of a scratching post I captioned it the same thing to keep it simple. I also added various hashtags “#kitten #playtime #paws #blackandwhite” , this was in order to make sure those that were looking at these hashtags would be able to have access to my post and thus network it.

How did you distribute the photo you recorded for upload to Instagram

In terms of distribution, I added hashtags in order to promote the circulation of my post. within a few hours of it being up i already had a couple of likes from accounts I had never heard of before. As this is my first post, I am still thinking of new ways I can network my Instagram page and have it seen.

REFERENCE 

Manovich, L 2016, Instagram and the Contemporary Image, University of San Diego, USA, pp.9-18