How did you author (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
This week’s photo was exactly what Instagram was built for, spontaneous posting. I was on my way to the supermarket when I saw this awesome old house. I pulled over to take a few photos, it was a wet sunset and it had some great colours coming through. I took it on my iPhone SE and tried to make the photo as straight as possible whilst taking the photo but I ended up needing to straighten it in the Instagram app using the smallest grid, because I really wanted it to be as straight and in line as possible. I brought the brightness down, put the contrast up, increased structure and put the lux up slightly too.
The choice to prioritise a curated feed over experimentation means that I often use the same editing features. As Manovich (2016, p.119) notes, one of the main distinctions between casual and professional photographs is the need to look generative and thematic over time. And I think that if I choose to experiment with filters and colours too much I will end up making a confusing feed.
This week I decided to put a lot more effort into my caption. It wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision but when I was posting the image it conjured a very specific image of who may live behind that front door. As you will discover, it is either a Fitzroy millennial, who rides their bike everywhere with their keys clipped to their belt loop. Or a little old granny who has lived there since the dawn of time. I found it really fun to explore those images further and attach them to the image posted.
Although, I have realised this week that I should start thinking about how everyone uses Instagram, and how this may be similar or different to my own ways of using Instagram. After all, there are one billion people using this software and I only follow 900 of them, so I need to consider how the other 999,999,100 users use Instagram.
How did you publish (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
I took multiple photos of this doorway with different lighting and different distances between myself and the door. But eventually I edited the 10 photos down to just one. I published the image on Instagram just after authoring, this time it was in the morning as opposed to night, but thus far I don’t think it has made any impact on likes because my following is so small. I used the geotag of Fitzroy, which is much more specific than my previous posts and I hope this specificity will help gain more engagement. I also used more hashtags than previous posts in an effort to experiment to see if more hashtags directly correlates to more likes. Or if those likes are more dependant on the subject matter and aesthetics of the post.
How did you distribute (the photo or video) you published on Instagram to other social media services?
I distributed the photo, again, through Tumblr and Twitter. I utilised the in-app distribution options, which make it a lot quicker to post. However, on Tumblr, I altered the caption to say ‘A door in Fitzroy, Melbourne’, because I think many users on Tumblr are much more concerned with the aesthetics of the image over it’s caption and I know no one would read the length caption that accompanied my Instagram post. I also altered the hashtags slightly, using #fitzroy, #melbourne, #boho, #indie, #love and #doorway. Due the constraints of Twitter in their 280 character limit, I was forced to change the caption for Twitter too, but I used the opportunity to experiment with some in-text hashtags. The tweet was ‘A lovely door in #Fitzroy, #Melbourne, pictured in some classic #MelbourneWeather. I incorporated the Melbourne Weather hashtag because it was suggested to me by Twitter, and seems to be quite a popular hashtag. Furthermore, I added the location to my Tweet, so I will see if this makes any difference to engagement levels.
On another interesting note, to ensure the format of my image matched Twitter I had to do a lot of in-app editing, consequently showing that Twitter has a lot more constraints than Tumblr.
References:
Manovich, L 2016, Instagram and the Contemporary Image, University of San Diego, USA, pp. 24-113.