Instagram Wins

Without meaning to, I seem to have moved my image posting activity over to Instagram, largely abandoning Flickr. I didn’t mean to, but the photographers and websites I want to follow on a daily basis were all there. Flickr remained a nice community, but didn’t have the engagement of prominent names in photography. Once I started my exploration of casual photography, it seemed natural to just start putting up images there.

Instagram feels more casual. Flickr creates a gallery and I felt compelled to maintain a certain quality of finished work when I posted. I’ve mostly posted iPhone images to Instagram in the past, so it feels easy enough to post a modestly post-processed image out of Photos.app to the site.

My casual workflow is a bit complicated, but I’m exploring options at this point. I’ve been capturing RAW + JPEG in my cameras and importing the JPEGs into Photos. That’s my casual, social media and personal sharing library. I’ve learned, as have many others in recent years, that JPEG shooting is fine 99% of the time with the latest wide dynamic range sensors, proper exposure, and the camera imaging engine, as long as post processing is limited to modification of black point, contrast, and highlight protection. The RAW files are still archived in Capture One for more extensive post-processing in Photoshop and Nik Filters.

If I’ve done some Photoshop or Nik Filter editing, I’ll just export a JPEG and import it into Photos. I have potential uploads marked as Favorites in the Photos.app, so it’s easy to look through recent edited images for Instagram, even if I just have my iPhone handy.

The likes and comments on Instagram are a nice way of knowing that my images are being viewed and appreciated out in the world. While this creative output is aimed intended for my own benefit, it’s a richer experience knowing there’s an audience. If I were photographing for others as side gig, that audience would be important to my business. As it is, I’ve got a nice job and can build an audience completely with commercial consideration. Writing here is a way to work out ideas and help out with some idiosyncratic considerations. The world seems to find workflow discussions most useful, either note-taking or photographic technique. All the time I’ve been writing here, I’ve shied away from real professional writing about Neurology or Drug Development, an early decision to keep the discussion here distinct from my work life.

Here I’m a photographer and armchair philosopher. Like so many other casual observers, I’m not building a brand, just exploring the world we find ourselves in. And I believe that finding meaning is an essential human activity.