As some of my close friends know, I have a quite large collection of various highly detailed statues, figurines, toys, and action figures. I’ve been collecting this stuff off and on for a while… it staved off quite a bit over the last decade and I’ve donated quite a number to my own kids, but I still obtain new “specimens” every once in a while. Personally I find it incredibly fascinating because of the amount of variety and detail in today’s figurines. People have told me they could spend hours just looking at my displays, all of which are carefully placed and posed by theme and setting.
As everyone knows, there is an increasing amount of photographic activity on networks like instaGram, Twitter and Facebook. While my body of professional work is still just as much a part of what I do with my cameras, I spent some time thinking about what and how I wanted to use instaGram. I use it to capture moments quickly, occasionally to display bits from my professional work, and overall to display the glory of this awesome little tool we all love called the iPhone. I too made fun of and mocked the trends that were becoming so overly prominent with instaGram – it was like over night, millions of people were posting the same shots with the same filters. Then I got my own iPhone, and I am so grateful for what this amazing tool adds to my overall photographic experience.
The 4s was actually my first iPhone even though I was very familiar with the platform and a lot of the tools. When shooting iPhone photography I see two main choices, even though there really are hundreds more really awesome apps that do amazing things with photos, and there are a number of ways to permutate your editing choices on the iPhone:
- Shoot it with the native iPhone camera, or at least an app that uses such, which has a more traditional panoramic ratio for composition – edit with Snapseed, share directly on Twitter or Facebook and/or import to Instagram
- Shoot straight from instaGram, which is limited to a square ratio for composition, and has a nice set of editing tools but not nearly as powerful as Snapseed
While I personally grind my teeth a bit at the fact that InstaGram limits you to a square ratio – there is something here that I like, that carries over to how I view all my iPhone photography these days. InstaGram has been somewhat accurately compared to Auto-Tune for photography, stating that it makes it too easy for people to make semi-pro looking photos, with little effort on the part of the photographer. While this is absolutely true to some degree, because instaGram auto sharpens and gives you only two real choices in terms of how you finalize a shot (filter + blur or filter + (no blur)) I find it interesting to try and evoke some of the same feeling I get in my other photos with such strict limitations. I hope that InstaGram eventually provides more choices, and I’d love to see the Nik Software guys write a sharing app that lets you use the power of Snapseed directly before you share.
Ultimately, along with everything else I normally do, I’ll be posing my wide variety of figurines in various environments and posting on InstaGram along with the “normal” stuff everyone does on the network, but usually just once a week to get some quick practice in.
I personally also additionally see this as an excellent form of photography practice. It is difficult to make an inanimate subject look interesting – it will require a pretty stiff imagination when it comes to composition – not only that, but I will be using video lights instead of strobes, thus it is an absolutely perfect setting to practice lighting and lighting ratios. It is also a great exercise to try and find quick, creative locations with little time, while being restricted to very little editing choices in post. In addition, it allows me the chance to mimic a slight studio setup in miniature on a repeated basis.
I hope you enjoy this series, and feel free to follow me on InstaGram at “idgroveman” and on Facebook here!
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