Are you on Instagram?
It took me a while to get my head around it … and to be honest, I’m still working on getting my head around it.
Being an early Flickr member, I joined in September of 2005, I have long enjoyed sharing photographs with long-distance friends. So many people who are now in my life, for real, I met through Flickr. For me, Flickr is like having a photo-album of my moments side-by-side with other people’s moments. What could be better? And being a photographer, in and of itself, was always a part of being on the site. It was about sharing the photographs (light, color, form, composition, camera, film, theme) too.
Over the last few years, so many of my Flickr friends are no longer around on the site having become too busy with their lives, I’m sure, just losing interest or because of the inception of Instagram.
I took it hard at first. I missed my community on Flickr! I missed logging in and seeing other friends Christmas Days next to mine. I missed learning about new film that I wanted to try out or a new restaurant that I wanted to go to. I missed my favorites page, a constant source of inspiration for me, growing and growing. I loved when I used to come across a photograph and sigh out loud out of its shear beauty. I would come back again and again and often times comment to the photographer as such. Flickr allowed me to have thoughtful, and thought provoking moments, away from the computer work I usually found myself doing … and I suppose to a smaller extent, it still does.
When Stephanie and I, along with our team here at 3191, decided to get on Instagram last year I was, shall we put it mildly, a little reluctant. “Taking photographs with your phone? What?! Why? It doesn’t even take good photographs!” was my attitude. And honestly, it is still a little bit like that for me. I am sort of a luddite when it comes to my phone. I am coming around … slowly.
And, I’ve found that being on Instagram with my team has been really fun! I am enjoying a new way of looking for photographs while I am out and about and I am finally understanding this new way of communicating (without caring as much about the things I care about in the photographs I take with a real camera).
Now, that said, let’s not get crazy! You won’t see me getting my own personal account any time soon. No sir. I spend enough time on my phone as it is! But, you will see me quite happily alongside SCB (Stephanie) + CMB (Chloe) + EBT (Evan) on our Instagram account: 3191milesapart. Hope to see you there!