jan
26
2011
So after some prodding from a coworker, I’m finally on Instagram. It’s a social photo-sharing service kind of like Flickr, but entirely smartphone-focused.
I had resisted for so long because I’m kind of ambivalent about all the photo filters and because Flickr has served my needs just fine so far. But I’ve decided to at least give it a try. I do appreciate how very easy it is — they’ve definitely given the user interaction some thought. And it can autopost the photos I take to Flickr at the same time I post to Instagram. So we’ll see how this goes.
One downside of being a late adopter is that someone’s already snapped up the username “alykat.” So if you’re on Instagram, you can find me under my fallback username: “roguealy.”
2 Comments So Far
How are you feeling about the filters, post signing-up? I worry they’re some kind of indication of our collective dissatisfaction with what we see in the world… causing us to adopt filter-colored glasses to return to a simpler sepia- and Kodachrome-tinged time and space. And, yes, partly amused but also partly serious about this…
Yeah, I share some of that concern.
Also, the journalist in me balks at the “fakeness” of the images — the image has been altered, it’s not how things actually looked, etc. (And the original, unaltered image is not backed up anywhere, so the filtered version is the only record of that moment.)
The designer in me is a little more open to the idea of altering the images to convey how the scene “felt” (so long as it’s not presented as documentary reality).
I don’t want to totally dismiss the use of filters — I’ve certainly had my fun with CameraBag and Hipstamatic and the like, and I know folks who have taken beautiful images with apps like these. But with Instagram, as a community, it seems like there’s a default expectation that folks will apply filters to their images. And (ok, I’m a snob) there’s a lot of noise in there — a lot of “let’s use a filter to try to make a crap photo look ‘artistic’” rather than a careful decision made to apply a filter (or not) in order to tell the story better.
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