How did you author (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
For this photo I used my iPhone SE. Typically iPhones don’t take great photos without a lot of light, and I found this to be the case here. While my phone is relatively outdated I can still often take some decent photos with it, particularly if I use the rear camera as I did here. However I feel like the the quality of it is impacted by the low level of light. This, combined with the square/size restriction of the Instagram app meant that I struggled to find a position to take a photo I was really happy with, and thus reduced the overall quality of the photo in my eyes. In terms of editing, all I used was the “Gingham” filter but I reduced it so the shot didn’t seem overly edited, pixelate more and further reduce the quality. There was no flash used in this shot. Generally I use my camera app to take the photos before I import them into Instagram. I do this mostly because I feel like it gives me more flexibility with the size and framing of the shot. I’ll take a few and decide which one is best for Instagram. With this shot however, I took the photo in the Instagram app with the sole purpose of uploading it to Instagram, and while the shot sizing suits the app more I didn’t like that restricted feeling as much.
How did you publish (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
The publication process for this was a relatively simple one. I didn’t take many photos in the last week, nor did I take many when I decided on my subject. Generally, however, my curation process is based on primarily the quality, lighting and size of the pictures. I added a location of my suburb before upload to maybe get some local following, and I also added 4 hashtags. The number was determined by the number of door-related hashtags I could actually think of, however now I think I’ll stick to three hashtags as the optimal number. Maybe I’ll go with doors, adoorable and one other that something to do with the specific door I’m documenting. My text caption is merely to give the photo some context.
How did you distribute (the photo or video) you published on Instagram to other social media services?
When I made the Instagram account I linked a Tumblr and Twitter account so that they would be ready to go as soon as I wanted to post. Once I did this it made it super easy to just select both apps when editing/publishing my photo onto Instagram so that then they automatically were published to Tumblr and Twitter as well. In relation to hashtags this transition seems to work well Twitter because, like Instagram, it uses hashtags as a way of categorising and archiving posts. However on Tumblr it’s not quite as neat. While Tumblr does use the hashtag function in a way, it doesn’t remove the useless hashtags in the caption. Instead it just doubles up the hashtags down the bottom, making it look a bit more cluttered in my opinion. I also don’t love the look of the “(at Ringwood North, Victoria, Australia)” for Tumblr and the “@ Ringwood North, Victoria, Australia” on Twitter when I’ve added a location to my Instagram post. I think this again makes the post a little cluttered and I’d rather that the viewer finds out the location after clicking onto the Instagram post. While I didn’t distribute this photo to Facebook, I have found in the past that this is probably the most seamless cross-platform publication method.
My front door. #door #doors #adoorable #frontdoor @ Ringwood North, Victoria, Australia https://t.co/4KggXMgR2k
— James (@door_ene) September 24, 2018