My thoughts on Instagram after all this time.

You may not care, but over the last month of very frequent, mostly daily use, I have developed some rather strong opinions about Instagram. If you're one of my photography friends, you might be interested.

An astute blog reader would notice immediately that I have abandoned Instagram in the last week or two. This is because it can be incredibly boring. After a long time I feel like all my photos look the same because I'm limited to the same twelve effects for every shot, and those effects are almost always whittled down to the few that aren't overwhelmingly overprocessed - Amaro, Rise, Hefe, Lofi, and X-pro for the most part. Although I admit I almost always want to use Amaro, but often stop myself for fear of overusing it. It's easy to get bored with it and just settle with something sub-par. I also dislike the squareness of it. No, I actually really like the squareness, I just wish it wasn't the only option. It's so limiting when you've taken a well-composed rectangular shot. And I've found that I almost never use the focusing thing. It almost always looks fake and it's realy hard to match up a real-life photo with a perfect circle or a perfect line of focus. It just doesn't make sense. I wish they had a focusing brush, or you could somehow mess with the aperture settings of the phone camera, but yeah.. I realize that's a lot to ask of a lowly app.

Also, Instagram on my phone enjoys shutting itself down randomly, taking two minutes to open up its camera, and freaking out when there's no internet connection to load up a shot. I really wish you had to choose to upload it; either it sucks and I don't want it on the internet under my name, or Instagram has a fit trying to upload it out of wifi. Stupid technology.

But sometimes, you know, the app allows me to make art out of the crap my phone produces, so I guess that's good. I still prefer the PhotoShop app, but that's tedious and still not very versatile. Mostly I just want to use Samson, my lovely Canon Rebel, and Camera Raw on my computer. But alas, such luxuries have stayed in Texas. I'm coming!

Here are a few of my favorite Instagram pictures I have taken, just for the heck of it. (I realize that most of these are photos of other people's art and maybe that makes me a dirty plagiarizer, but all I can say to that is "PTOOEY!")