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Instagram
Before the iPhone came out Flickr was a really popular source for sharing photos and keeping up with the photos your friends have taken. Flickr is still insanely great today, but the introduction of Twitter and sharing photos with friends instantly has overtaken it on the mobile side. This is where Instagram comes in. Think of it as Twitter for images, instead of text. You follow people, “like” photos, attach a GPS position to the photo you post, and share your photo to other sites like Flickr and Foursquare.Instagram has been out for a year and it really has not changed much in that time period. You can take a photo inside their application or import a photo from your camera roll. Optionally you can apply a filter to your photo to portray a mood. You can also apply a tilt-shift effect by directing focus on to a part of the photo while blurring everything else out.
Photos on Instagram are restricted to a square shape. That is not a bad thing because with a square it is easy to keep track of one of the basic rules of composing a photo, the rule of thirds. The rule of thirds is when you align objects in your photo to a grid, kind of like the squares in The Brady Bunch’s intro. Your iPhone has an option in the built-in camera application to turn on a grid mode to make applying this rule easier. Aligning your photos to this grid will help your photos turn out nicer than always putting your subject in the center of the photo.
Using Instagram has taught me a lot about photography. Not because of the filters and the tilt-shift, but because it has inspired me to take more photos of things. Just like good writers are constantly writing, a good photographer is always taking photos.
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