[Joseph Linaschke] Getting the Most from Instagram(Book ZZ PDF

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Download [Joseph Linaschke] Getting the Most from Instagram(Book ZZ PDF

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Getting the Most from Instagram Joseph Linaschke

Getting the Most from Instagram by Joseph Linaschke http://PhotoJoseph.com Peachpit Press 1249 Eighth Street Berkeley, CA 94710 510/524-2178 510/524-2221 (fax) Find us on the Web at: www.peachpit.com To report errors, please send a note to: [email protected] Peachpit Press is a division of Pearson Education. Copyright © 2011 by Joseph Linaschke Editor: Rebecca Gulick Copyeditor: Liz Welch Production Coordinator: Mimi Vitetta Cover Photos: Joseph Linaschke Cover Design: Peachpit Press Notice of Rights All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information on getting permission for reprints and excerpts, contact [email protected]. Notice of Liability The information in this book is distributed on an “As Is” basis, without warranty. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of the book, neither the author nor Peachpit Press shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the instructions contained in this book or by the computer software and hardware products described in it. Trademarks Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and Peachpit was aware of a trademark claim, the designations appear as requested by the owner of the trademark. All other product names and services identified throughout this book are used in editorial fashion only and for the benefit of such companies with no intention of infringement of the trademark. No such use, or the use of any trade name, is intended to convey endorsement or other affiliation with this book. 13-digit ISBN: 0132875772 10-digit ISBN: 0132875772

Table of Contents What Is This Instagram Thing, Anyway? The “Making Photos Look Old Makes Them Look Cool” Phenomenon Getting the Most from Your iPhone Camera Touring the Instagram Interface Sharing Which Camera Should I Use? Filter Choices Which Filter Should I Use? Tilt-Shift Sharing Your Photo Which Filter Did I Use?! Speaking of Keywords... Caption as Version Name Instagramming While Roaming Third-Party Ecosystem Privacy Help System More from This Author Discounts! Thanks

What Is This Instagram Thing, Anyway? If you’re reading this book, chances are you’ve already downloaded the free Instagram app for your iPhone, have snapped a few photos on your own, and probably posted a handful as well. Maybe you have some followers, maybe you don’t... perhaps you’ve found a few interesting Instagram photographers to follow and have been endlessly entertained by the constant stream of funky photographic goodness flowing by. But you may still be asking yourself, why? Why is this different from posting photos on Twitter or Facebook or any other site? Two words. Photography. Community. Twitter is all about the text you write: 140 characters or less of witty banter, and sure you can attach photo to it, but it’s really all about the text. Oh, and changing the world—that too. Facebook is the social phenomenon of course, allowing you to connect with long-lost friends and even make some new ones. Instagram, though, is entirely about the photograph. Notice when you swim the stream, wha you see are photos. Yes, there’s some text, and some likes and comments, but really, it’s all about the photograph. That’s what makes Instagram unique. You can’t even post without a photo. You don’t pos text and add a photo to it—you make a picture and add text to that (but only if you want to). But it’s no fun posting photos that no one sees. And it’s loads of fun seeing what other people are doing with their photos. So you build a social circle, just like the other social platforms. You follow those that are interesting, and you stop following those that just share photos of their cat, Mr. Giggles Sure, just like any other social platform, you’ll see loads of rubbish—but the beauty of Instagram is that most posters really do care about the quality of their images. In fact, I’d go as far as suggesting that many users who start by posting boring photos slow down or even stop once they realize the caliber of much of the work on view. Hopefully they are inspired by the stream of photographic goodness and want to make their photos as good, or better, than the others they’re seeing. And that’s what this book is for. This book has been written to help you get the most out of Instagram. To guide you toward making better and better pictures that more and more people want to see—including yourself. After all, if yo don’t enjoy looking at your photos, why should anyone else?

Flowers and buildings and people, oh my!

The “Making Photos Look Old Makes Them Look Cool” Phenomenon It’s true that you can snap a photo of just about anything, apply a funky ’70s retro faded scratched film filter to it, and suddenly it’s “art.” A lot of otherwise boring photos have been made “interesting” by virtue of lens flare, faded colors, torn edges, and grain.

Even boring can be beautiful.

However—and here’s the cool part—if you actually take a good photo to begin with and then add funk to it, you can end up with something truly remarkable. All from that itty-bitty iDevice in your hand. So to get started, before we even crack open the app, let’s talk about how to make your iPhone photos better.

Getting the Most from Your iPhone Camera This is a topic that could fill a book in itself, but let’s cover some basics here. Tip #1: Change Your Perspective The iPhone is such a small, portable camera that you can literally put it places that larger, professional cameras simply can’t go. The lens sits in the corner of the phone, about 1 cm away from either edge. This means that the lens can sit 1 cm off the ground, off a wall, whatever you like. You can put the camera under a flower. Between chess pieces. Poking out of your shirt pocket. Places where a larger camera can only dream of existing. Take advantage of this. Most human eyes live around 5 to 6 feet off the ground, and we’re pretty darn used to seeing the world from this perspective. Get your iPhone lower, higher, inside or behind things, where your viewers are not so likely to have stuck their face. Provide a different point of view. Change your perspective.

Change your perspective; change your world.

Tip #2: Steady On, Son Because the camera is so small and light, it’s tempting to shoot one-handed. But I encourage you to use both hands, or to steady the camera on another surface (table, water glass, lamppost) when shooting, for two reasons. First, photos are always better when the camera doesn’t move. Unless you’re shooting in the brightest of sunlight, odds are the shutter speed will be longer, meaning that if the camera moves while shooting, your photo will be blurry—and it’s actually quite difficult to hold the camera steady, simply because it weighs so little. No one wants to see a blurry photo. The other reason to stabilize is that the basic act of grabbing the camera with two hands, or looking for another

way to steady it, engages your brain just a bit more into the photo-making process. Instead of “I’ll jus grab a quick snap of that,” your brain starts to think “Hmm, maybe if I move here... no, here, or there. maybe I’ll get a better photo.” Try it—you’ll see what I mean. That part of our brain just needs to be kicked into gear sometimes, and grabbing the camera with two hands is a simple way to do that.

Look around—nearly anything can be used to stabilize your camera.

Tip #3: Focus When the iPhone 3GS was released, autofocus was introduced to the iPhone camera; previous generation iPhones only featured “fixed focus.” Fixed focus means that the camera doesn’t actually focus on the subject; anything past a certain distance is considered “in focus.” This makes photos flat and generally uninteresting, and never truly sharp. With autofocus, however, the lens physically moves, focusing on precisely what you want it to. And if that subject is close to the lens, you can get depth of field in your photos, meaning that objects in front or behind your main subject will be noticeably blurry (called “bokeh” in photo-geek talk). This makes your primary subject pop out of th photo—very nice. To control focus on the iPhone, all you have to do is touch the subject on the iPhone screen that you want to be sharp; the camera quickly snaps to focus on that thing. This is yet another reason to hold the camera with two hands, or to rest it on something while shooting. As you make slight variations to angle or position of the camera, you can also play with focusing on different elements of the scene.

Tap to focus on what matters most.

Tip #4: Photo on Release You know the button you touch on the iPhone to take the photo? It doesn’t actually take a picture when you touch it—it takes a picture when you release it. This is helpful to know when you’re trying to time a shot precisely or just trying to hold the camera super steady. Get the camera into position, put your finger on the button, and hold it. Now when you take your finger off the screen, the photo will be snapped. The camera moves less (or ideally not at all), and if you’re trying to capture an exact moment, there’s less delay from when your brain says “go!” to when the photo is actually taken. Tip #5: HDR + Instagram = (heart) When using Instagram’s built-in camera, you can’t enable the HDR feature found in the latest iPhone and iOS. However, you don’t have to use that camera—you can shoot with the regular iPhone Camer app, and then open those pictures in Instagram for treatment. I find that most HDR photos made on the iPhone lean toward green, or otherwise look a bit funky and unnatural—so I’m not generally a fan. But if you treat those HDR photos in Instagram, since you’re probably distorting the colors anyway, often the color shift in the original photo is irrelevant. And yet you gain all the goodness of HDR—th extra details in the shadows and highlights that would’ve otherwise been lost. Plus, if you do shoot in HDR mode, you get two photos—the normal as well as the HDR version. So you can always try both in Instagram.

HDR and Instagram: photo nirvana!

Touring the Instagram Interface Let’s get started in the app itself. First, a tour, so you know what each screen is for and what it does. Share The primary icon, front and center and bigger, is the Share button. This is where you capture, create, and share your Instagrammy goodness. You can shoot a photo or pull one out of your Pictures collection, add treatments to it, and share it with the world—all from one place. We’ll come back to this in detail later.

The Share button starts it all.

Feed On the far left, you’ll find the Feed button. This is your customized feed, showing the photo stream of all the people you’re following, in real time along with an indication of how long ago each photo wa taken. From here you can “like” or comment on someone’s photo, or flag it as inappropriate if you feel the need.

The Feed window shows all that you need to see.

You can also tap on a username here to get to their profile and see all of their photos. This feature is handy if you haven’t been on in a while, and you want to check up on a particular user to see what they’ve posted without having to sift through everything else. Also when viewing a user’s page, you can tap the gear menu to block or report them. If you don’t want them following your photo stream for any reason, this will keep them from viewing your shots.

Tip In many views, you can toggle between a list and a thumbnail view. List will show you all the photos at full size, but the thumbnail view can be a quick way to take a glance at dozens of photos at once. Just look for the grid or list icon at the top of many pages.

A user’s profile is a treasure trove of data. Likes

Under each photo, you’ll see the caption that the photographer included with the photo, listed as the first comment. You can also find the Like and the Comment buttons there. “Like” is a simple indicato that you like a photo, and adds up the tally of likes to the picture, which you can see immediately under it. The more likes a photo has, the higher the probability it will make it to the Popular page, at which point, the more probable it is that thousands of other Instagrammers will find it and follow tha user. So if you like a photo, tap that little button. You’re helping increase the exposure of the photographer!

Tip A shortcut to “like” a photo is simply to double-tap on it. A white heart will momentarily appear over the photo to show that you liked it.

Double-tap to like a photo.

Comments

This is also where you can comment on a photo. If you want to get somebody’s attention, you can include their Instagram username in the comment with the @ symbol in front of it, and it becomes a link to their name—and they also get notified that they were mentioned in a comment. This isn’t necessary to grab the attention of the photographer—they’ll always know you’ve commented because it shows up in their News stream. However, if for example a user comments on a photo and you want to respond or follow up on that user’s comment, be sure to put their @username in the comment— otherwise chances are they’ll never see it. When you’re commenting or adding a caption, as soon as you type the @ symbol followed by a letter, a list of matching usernames comes up, making it easy to locate and tag someone correctly.

Tip If you’re posting to Twitter the same time you post to Instagram, be aware that a user’s @ name on Twitter may be different than the one on Instagram, so you could end up tagging the wrong person when read via Twitter. Many early users of Instagram grabbed the same name as they already had on Twitter, but of course you can’t rely on that. Location

Another cool feature here is the location search. Say you’re looking at a photo of the Maker Faire tha someone has just posted; you know it’s from there because immediately above the photo, there’s a tin location pin and the name “Maker Faire 2011.” If you tap on that name, a new page opens showing that location on a map—and also all the other Instagram photos posted from there! This is a very coo way to explore a popular location in the world, or even simply to see what other photos have been made in your favorite coffee shop. (I just tapped on a recent photo from the café I’m sitting in, and scrolled back to find a photo I made here last Christmas that I’d forgotten about... neat!) Also note tha if you tap on the map itself, you can open it in the Maps app.

Tap a photo’s location to see more shots from that area. Tags

While commenting (or posting), you can include tags. If you’re familiar with Twitter’s hashtags, it’s the same thing here. Users (or viewers) can tag the photos (think of it like adding keywords), which automatically links them to any other photo with the same tag. Tags are automatically made into links so if you or the photographer tags a photo #baby or #cat or #appsperiment (go on, try that one), then you can tap the tag and bring up all the linked photos in the Instaverse. Flagging

The last thing you’ll see before moving on to the next photo in the stream is a little bar with three dot on it. For anyone else’s photo, all you can do here is “Flag for review.” Basically if you find a photo that’s patently offensive you can flag it. But keep in mind that Instagram is a global phenomenon, and you may not always like what you see—and if you don’t, you can just un-follow that user. No one is forcing you to look at their work.

Tip It is technically against the Instagram terms of service (http://instagr.am/legal/terms/) to “post nude, partially nude, or sexually suggestive photos,” although I do see the latter two quite a bit. So if you decide to join those ranks of posters, don’t be surprised to find your account shut down unexpectedly one day. Sharing, Again

If you’re looking at your own photo, however, you’ll have a lot more options under that triple-dot button. You can delete your own post, or share it (using the same Sharing options when you originally posted the photo, such as Flickr or Facebook, giving you a chance to share where you didn’t before, or simply to share again). You can also copy a URL to the clipboard from here, so you can switch to any other app and paste the link to your picture. There’s also an email button here, which will email that specific photo to anyone you like, directly. Finally, you can manage comments here, allowing you to delete any comments on your own photo that you don’t like, or even to delete your own original message and post a new one (if you mispelld something or simply changed your mind). Popular To the right of the Feed button is Popular. This shows the current trending photos in Instagram; the ones that have the most likes, comments, and traffic in general. It’s a great place to find photographer to follow, since the general idea is that the best photos in the Instaverse show up here. Of course this should be used just as a starting point; not everything in here is amazing, just popular. You’ll find a lo of tattoo and cleavage shots showing up because they end up with hundreds of “likes.” OK, I know half of you are dying to go look now... go on, I’ll wait. By the time you’ve looked more closely at all the photos you want to see there, if you tap the refresh icon in the top right, you’ll get a whole new page of photos. You could spend all day here, really.

The Popular page shows the current favorites on Instagram.

News To the right of Share is News. It’s all about you, baby. It shows every like, comment, and new follower you receive; it could also be called the Ego button. However, if you switch from the “You” view to the “Following” view under News, you’ll see what the folks that you’re following have been up to—what they’ve liked, what they’ve posted, and what photos of theirs have made it to the covete “Popular” page. This is a fantastic place to find new people to follow, since you’re getting an insight into what photos people who you like, like.

Check out your News or your friends’ News from here.

Profile, Account, and Sharing Settings On the far right is the Profile button, which is where you’ll find sharing settings, your follower count and more. It’s not an exciting part of the program, but an important one. Try not to fall asleep as we g through all this.

The Profile section is crammed with good stuff.

At the very top of the screen, you’ll see your icon and name, with an About button to the right of it. The About button is About Instagram, not about you. It will reveal a page with access to the Help Desk, a link to their Web site, and more. To view your information, simply tap your own icon there. This will show you how many photos you’ve posted, followers you have, and people you’re following. It also reveals your entire stream, showing all the photos you’ve posted. Find Friends has several options to seek out new people to follow. The first option is your own address book, which is quite cool. Instagram will compare your entire address book to its database o users and show you any matches. It can do the same thing with your Facebook friends and your Twitter followers. Or you can search for a person by their real name or username. Finally, there’s a Suggested Users list, showing a series of Instagram’s favorite users.

You can find new friends from your contacts, Facebook, Twitter, and more.

Back to the main Profile page, you can also Invite Friends, allowing you to send an invitation to join to anyone in your address book. This is a nice way to nudge someone into getting onto Instagram that y...