How did you author (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
For this week’s photo post, I recorded an image on Smith St in Fitzroy as I was passing it. It’s a doorway that I’ve had in mind to record as part of this assignment since we got it but I always rush past it and forget. This time I tried to author the photo inside the Instagram app, I managed to record the photo but I have realised I hate using the app to take photos. As I’ve mentioned before, you can only take one photo at a time, which is easily the biggest draw back because one of the main benefits of iPhone and digital photography is that you can take as many photographs as you like and then keep the best ones. This is a massive difference between digital photography and analogue photography, because with Analogue photography you need to take more time and care to position the image within the frame to capture the right photo, or risk wasting time and money. And you only get one or two shots to nail it, but you don’t find out until that moment is passed when you get your film processed and printed.
The first image is probably the most post-produced image I have made in the course of this assignment. For the first image, I brought the brightness down to create a more moody image, raised contrast to bring out the colours in the image and make the beer sign pop (I also increased saturated for the same effect), colour graded the image blue to try and create a more thematic feed and brought the highlights down to make sure the image didn’t look too gaudy. This is the first time in this assignment that I’ve experimented with the gallery feature on Instagram, and quite liked the result – two door photos linked through lighting which would otherwise have nothing to do with each other. Even on my personal Instagram, I tend to steer away from galleries because I know that as a consumer I only bother to scroll if I’m really interested especially if there is any more than three. So, it is lucky that Instagram makes us prosumers (both producers and consumers of content) and gives us the ability to change our processes on the same platform to more accurately reflect what we see as effective and aesthetically pleasing.
For the second image, I did much less, I increased contrast to increase the vibrancy of the neon light colour, lightened the shadows to make the neon light seem brighter and sharpened the image, which just made the edges of objects and shadow seem more dramatic. This week, I posted a few more photos and videos taken when I was in Europe, just to further explore the features, and mainly try and figure out why I hate using standard filters. And I think I have arrived at a draft answer; I really dislike the generic filters because they are way too:
- Intense – they change the image too dramatically and make it look either too lo-fi, provide weird vignettes or just look over done.
- Standardised – they haven’t changed much since the inception of Instagram and I think when I see an image of someone using a generic filter it automatically looks like there was no thought process. This week’s reading noted that ‘Software applications and platforms are attractive precisely because they are designed toward increasing efficiencies and productivity…..and providing new forms of play and creativity’ (Kahoo et al, 2017, p.5). And in some way this is great, but Instagram’s mission of making it quick and easy to share images has been exceeded to the point where some images seem to have had no creative thought put into them at all. And when this is the case, they are not encouraging a creative process but cutting it up and bypassing all the hurdles people encounter, which would usually fuel their creativity.
How did you publish (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
I published the photos with a mid length caption, about the way lighting in venues makes me feel, because I feel that my images capture how lighting can build character. I added a few more hashtags than normal and so far they haven’t garnered more likes but I will check back in a few days. The hashtags were; #beer #door#neonlights #fairlights #boho #pub#inspo #drinks #happyhour#melbourne #nightlife #fitzroy, and I was quietly confident that these would garner more likes for my post, but I don’t think they have.
This week I decided to make a story feature called ‘Doors That Didn’t Make It’, but due to the constraint Instagram has when creating story highlights it is now known as ‘Didn’t Make it’. I started, and will continue to post, photos that I’ve taken of doors that I wasn’t quite sure about, either aesthetically or because I might have been pushing the definition of a door too much. But in a way, it makes me much more excited to provoke ideas of what doors may be, than to simply record doors, for instance, is the Chinatown Gate just a big door? After all, it is just a piece of wood signifying a threshold and that you are passing into a new space. And to me that’s a door.
How did you distribute (the photo or video) you published on Instagram to other social media services?
I distributed the photos to Tumblr and Twitter again, and despite having a combined 600 followers between the sites, I don’t think this distribution strategy has increased traffic to my Instagram page, which is fine as I’m not concerned about that –
beyond understanding what conventions are most liked by my small following. In my past experience, people are much more likely to like a photo if there is a human in it, but I only have personal anecdotes to back this up.
Distribution of my stories happens automatically, but I also created an archive for those who may want to see them after they have expired as stories. This archive or ‘highlight’ is quite fun to flick through and has pushed me to find more creative objects that could be considered doors.
References:
Khoo E, Hight C, Torrens R, Cowie B 2017, ‘Introduction: Software and other Literacies’ in Software Literacy: Education and Beyond, Springer, Singapore