I’ve recently started using Instagram, after an absence of a couple of years. It’s fun! Any photo you take looks better on Instagram –
- it’s small, so it doesn’t matter if it’s not in focus
- it’s square, so you are forced to crop the photo to focus on what’s important
- you can quickly and easily make the colours brighter
- you can change the colours altogether, so it looks like art or an old photograph
I find them Instagram photos very useful for blog posts. Here’s a post I just wrote about technology and the year ahead. When I went looking in my collection for the perfect illustration I found the one I took a couple of months ago of the old wooden escalators at Wynyard Station. Perfect!
You can turn any photo into an Instagram work of art. You don’t have to take the photo with Instragram; you can select an existing photo as long as it’s on your phone or tablet, and then go to work on it. Here’s a photo I took a couple of days ago of the carton of freshly-picked cherries we bought on the way home from Melbourne. I opened Instagram and found the photo, then cropped it and made it more red. Dropbox then uploaded it to my laptop automatically.
OK, the closeup photos are not fabulous. That’s the fault of my phone, not Instagram!
When you are out and about with a phone that takes pictures, think about taking some photos of ordinary things – food, stairs, brick walls, windows and doors, clouds, trees – and then Instagram them when you get home to use in your blog. Easy!