Week 10 – Photo

https://www.instagram.com/p/CA2iV5ggLpY/

How did you author the photo?

I took the photo with my smartphone Mobile OPPO AX5s using the rear camera which one has a sensor: 13MP & 2MP and the rear aperture is f/2.2 + f/2.4.

It is a corner close to where I live and for a long time it was under construction, but that morning was the first time that I saw it finished. The conservation of the old façade with an impressive new building on the top captured my attention immediately. The first levels of the new building have an angle that reflects the street at a 45-degree angle. The design of the new building does not interfere with the heritage building below, but still utilises the airspace above. The angled element also provides an interesting reflection of Collins Street.

If I had to categorise it, this is a casual photo because it has a personal meaning as I have watched the construction on one of my favourite streets and I enjoyed the beautiful architectural design. Casual photos can be defined as, ‘the content of casual photos is more important to their users than following the rules of good photography, so a “bad photo” with the important subject is accepted rather than rejected’ (Manovich, p. 16)

How did you publish the photo?

Even if I would like to think that it looks like a professional photo it needed adjustments before posting, for example the use of lenses. Manovich tells,

‘In these photos (casuals), visual characteristics such as contrast, tones, colors, focus, composition, or rhythm are not carefully controlled, so from the point of view of proper good photography these are often (but not always) bad photos’ (Manovich, p. 16).

For me seemed obvious that the camera has to be placed portrait because it is a tall building and the original photo looks more impressive than the square 1:1 format posted on my Instagram profile. I forgot that I could expand the photo to a full length when uploading, so the image was cropped into a square losing the length of the building. Although Instagram allows you to extend the image, I automatically reverted to the original square constraint of the platform, not doing justice to my photo and the design of the building.

How did you distribute the photo you published on Instagram to other social media services?

I published the photo to Instagram with the hashtags #buildingabovebuilding #bab #collinsst #facade #cityexpansion and with a geolocation tag for CBD in Melbourne. Using the tags on my post could help to share this new building and innovative design ‘The data generated by taking a photograph, and the metadata (data about that photo) generated by the mobile device taking the photo, and added manually by the user in terms of tagging people, locations, adding hashtags, or simply in the image’s captions, all add to the usefulness of the image as a datapoint that can be added to, compared with, and analysed as part of other data points (Vaidhyanathan 2018)’ (Leaver et al, p.21).

When I posted the photo, I shared it to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, with the first two publishing the same square photos as on my Instagram. However, on Twitter, the image was not displayed, rather a link back to Instagram. Interestingly, this constraint when sharing to Twitter is intentional ‘Twitter also removed the ability for Instagram images to appear in the main Twitter timeline (D’Orazio 2012). Where Instagram images had previously been embedded in Twitter, the changes meant that posts could now only appear as a link which needed to be clicked and opened in another program – a browser or app – in order to see the image.’ (Leaver et al., p. 20)

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