Welcome back to my series of confusing endless doors.
How did you author (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
I used my iPhone 6s’s rear facing camera to take this little baby. It’s not in the best quality and sometimes it’s unable to capture the beauty of a certain moment but in general, I’m happy with it. I set the basic “Normal” mode with no flash. With my theme, the endless doors, the hardest part is to choose the suitable scene and the second hardest part is an angle that can show all the doors. I took this by standing up and instead of zooming in, which can reduce the quality of the photo, I got close to the doors but not too close so I can be able to capture the whole package of doors. With Instagram, I can immediately apply filter after taking a new photo by swiping right. Although Instagram only have limited filters available but it’s a great feature. I usually use that for “story”, another great feature from Instagram that I used to talk about in my previous post, which allow you to upload 24-hour photos or videos. With this photo, I didn’t edit by using Instagram filter but by its basic built-in adjusting tools. Since the photo was taken against the light, it was hard to balance the color after that. I reduced the exposure and the contrast while remain the saturation. This photo can be identified as casual, refer to the classification of Manovich in our week 9’s reading.
“We will analyze what we see as three common types of Instagram photos. We
call these types casual, professional, and designed.” (Manovich, 2016)
How did you publish (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
“we are not just photographers today: we have also become distributors, archivists and curators …”
(Kuc, 2016)
Just like our week 5 reading stated, the process of distribution, publication and curation almost become inseparable from the practice of photography nowadays.
In my personal experience, I usually have three stages of publishing: selecting the best one, deciding the caption, location, tag and finally publishing. For this photo, I apply the same process. I took multiple photos then chose this one to edit based on my usual criteria. After finishing edit, I turned to the publishing stage. Instagram only allow users to upload square photos so I have to cut my photo into the perfect square size. I then decided to upload it without adding location since the picture was taken in my friend’s house and I wanted to keep it private. I put on the title “Which door will you choose?” because I always come up with that question in my mind everytime I stand in front of multiple choices of doors.
How did you distribute (the photo or video) you published on Instagram to other
social media services?
Like I said in, I hardly ever share my Instagram posts on other platforms. Only until taking this class that I started sharing posts to Facebook but only because its a part of the assignment, not because I want to.
I clicked on the share icon on my Instagram post, which is really convenient since it connect to other platforms. I chose Facebook as my go-to platform since I don’t have Twitter account. Instagram then directed me to Facebook post page. I didn’t add any hashtag or caption to my share post since I shared it on the assignment’s request so I wanted to gain as little attention as possible. So I just shared it anyway without adding anything to the post. In the other hand, if I share post on purpose, I normally will choose caption carefully.
References
Manovich, L 2016, Instagram and the Contemporary Image, University of San Diego.