Waiting for the Instagram Muse

I'm a late adopter of Instagram because the app was designed for iPhones and I have always used an HTC so that by the time the android version of Instagram was launched I was using twitter for landscape photography. I didn't think very much more about Instagram until MasterM suggested that I create an account so that I could see his pictures.

Each form of social media has strengths and weaknesses and it has been interesting to explore Instagram this week. I am surprised how small the pool of users appears to be with everyone following everyone else so that the images are quite homogenous. When I look for different accounts it is not obvious how to find them - Pinterest offers trails to follow and twitter has the retweet which introduces unlikely topics and innovative users to a wider community. When I took landscape shots for twitter I posted them at the time they were taken and I assumed that Instagram would be similar but it seems that it is used as a version of Facebook with images selected and edited and not necessarily contemporaneous and this surprised me. I can see how friends who used to blog regularly have used Instagram as a microblogging site and this ties in with the move from laptops to tablets. Instagram has a feeling of intimacy and it is very soothing to scroll though the images especially if you are escaping from the rancour of the #indyref debate on twitter but too much can become overwhelming.

I think it will be a while before I find a theme for my Instagram photos, something which separates them from my blog and my twitter feed because I don't see the point in duplicating everything but until the I will potter on taking pictures of roses and trying to think of something interesting to say about them. Oh, and I can confirm that it was a couple of days before I realised that Instagram photos are square. I'm @alice.christie if you want to peek at my early failures.