Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
All tagged Instagram
Some people prefer posting their photos to instagram using a frame, with white borders surrounding the image, n order to preserve the original aspect ratio. People are quite divided as to whether or not this is a good thing to do or not, but if you want to do it, there are lots of ways to go about it. If you use Lightroom, there’s actually a pretty easy way to get the white border effect inside of Lightroom, without having to use plug-ins or go to Photoshop.
Last week I started having some weird things happen to one of my Instagram accounts. Instagram suddenly started sending me emails for my “Streets of Dublin” Instagram account in Russian. At first, I thought it musty be a hack or someone had breached my account, but there is a whole thread on Reddit about it from people having the same problem.
If you don’t print your images, you may not have spent much time in Lightroom’s print module. The thing is, though, the print module is actually quite a useful and relatively easy to use layout tool, that can be used for more than just printing. A little while ago I posted about how to use it for framing your images to post to Instagram, but that’s just the start.
If you post on Instagram, I’m sure you’ve come across the problem of getting your images to fit within the Instagram aspect ration. Instagram uses 5X4 (or 4X5) as the ratio for images posted to the platform, but most cameras shoot 6X4. There are many ways around this, such as cropping to the right ratio and making special Instagram versions. Another popular option is to fame your image in its default format inside a white frame that fits on Instagram. This is quite common, and I recently got a question from a reader asking if there was a way to do this from within Lightroom. There is, and it involves using the Print Module.
If you haven’t seen them before, a Lensball is basically a polished glass sphere. That’s pretty much all there is to it, but once you’re aware of it, you start to see them cropping up everywhere, in Instagram and other online photos. A little while ago, the company that makes them sent me one to review, and I’ve been having fun with it ever since.
I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Instagram. I go through periods of wanting to put the effort into it and then wondering if its worth the effort. On the one hand, it’s the platform of choice at the moment for photographers, whether you like that or not. On the other hand, ever since Facebook took over and started integrating its algorithm, I now only see a fraction of the posts from the people I follow, which is infuriating. However, I’ve decided to give it one more push before I give up. With that in mind, I was researching various techniques and tips for growing the platform, and I’ve come across some interesting ideas.
If you’re an Instagram user, you’re probably familiar with the importance of Hashtags. Just like on Twitter, hashtags let you assign a topic to your photos, and using hashtags allows other users to find your work. If you want to grow your account you really need to use this technique as doing so can mean a big difference in the amount of people that see your work. There is a dark side to using hashtags on Instagram however, and it’s to do with the rise of aggregate accounts.
Instagram has finally added what I'm sure is probably the most requested feature: multiple account support. With the latest version of the app on both iOS and Android, you can now have more than one account (you can now have up to 5). You can also easily switch between them and post to multiple accounts as well.
I was coming back from a week in London on Saturday, and our flight was approaching Dublin at sunset. The view out the window of the plane was amazing with the sun just sitting above the clouds. As we began our descent it looked even more impressive, so I grabbed my iPhone and fired up the hyper lapse app, and recorded our descent through the clouds, and then down until we landed.
