A month of Instagram

I don’t like being the target of surveillance by Mark Zuckerberg and his gang. I wouldn’t want to add up the time I have spent on Insta­gram. I resent the ad­ver­ti­sing that gets more intrusive with each update. At times I feel like chuck­ing it in.

But, I do get a buzz from editing each image, composing a caption and hashtags, uploading the piece for my few fol­low­ers, and watch­ing their response. And so I keep doing it.

There is nothing insta about Instagram the way I use it. I select each image from my photo archive after it has had time to ripen and mature, per­haps for a month, or a year, or longer. These are pictures taken with a camera, not a phone. I edit each picture in Lightroom and upload it via the LR/Instagram plug-in.

I make it a rule to make just one post per day (I unfollow people who post too much).

I have spent the month of April travelling in Africa and Europe. For a change, I have been posting photos while they are still fresh​—​some on the day I took them, the rest a day or so later. Between 5 April and 30 April I posted the 25 tra­vel­ling pictures shown below.

Trivia: I took two cameras on this trip​—​a Canon EOS 5D Mark II with EF 16–35mm f/4L IS USM lens (which I used for 15 of these photos), and a FujiFilm X-E1 with XF 18mm f/2 R lens (5 photos) and XC 50–230mm OIS II lens (4 photos). One picture is a computer screen shot.

I play a little game with myself, trying to guess what sort of re­spon­se each picture will get from my followers. If I guess a picture will be unappealing I am usually right.

I had fair success in predicting which of this month’s pictures people would like. See the six most-liked images in the slideshow below.