Lucy Joe Frances: 2013

Wednesday 24 April 2013

Urban Dictionary definitions of Instagram

Every hipster's favourite way to make it look like they take really classy pictures when really they are still using their phones. Yeah, you might look really cute/old school/vintage/retro, but it's still a cell phone picture.

Photographer: Hey man, look at this picture I took with my Canon 5D Mark II camera and edited in Photoshop!

Hipster: No way man, look at this picture that I took on my phone with Instagram! It's even better!

Photographer: *FACEPALM*

Instagram: Pretentious, overused app that purchasing may cause feelings of hipster-ism, false sense of being artistic when taking mobile photos. When used with your mobile device, add grain, "vintage" filters, and corny Polaroid borders, with the upmost laziness.

Hipster: Check my Instagram uploads to see multiple shitty pictures of my dog, and food with vintage filters. I consider myself to be a photographer and creative because I purchased an app that millions of other people use. Learn to manipulate photos on photoshop, lighting and ISO settings? Puh-lease.

(Definitions available at: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Instagram)

The Selfie

A picture taken of yourself that is planned to be uploaded to Facebook, Myspace or any other sort of social networking website. You can usually see the person's arm holding out the camera in which case you can clearly tell that this person does not have any friends to take picture of them so they resort to Myspace to find internet friends and post pictures of themselves, taken by themselves. A selfie is usually accompanied by a duck face or the individual looking in a direction that is not towards the camera.
(Definition available at: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=selfie)

(Image available at: http://www.cambio.com/2013/04/19/zayn-malik-and-perrie-edwards-selfies-zerrie-duck-face-pics-wedding-buzz-little-mix-video/)

Selfies seems to have quite a negative reputation, they certainly don't have a good reputation. It seems more of a jokey thing to do and if people on Facebook actually seem serious about their selfies most people seem to mock them.

Monday 22 April 2013

Photographers using Instagram

Searching through Instagram can sometimes be a bore. A lot of the images on there seem to be the same, as I have stated in my earlier post "Some people seem to really hate Instagram".
Creative Bloq wrote an article about 8 inspiring photographers to follow on Instagram. The "Instagrammers" they recommended seem to have a fresh take on the "typical" Instagram photos.

Mike Kus

Dan Rubin

Darryll Jones

Marcus Rodriguez

Mark Hunter

Jane Samuels

Dustin Vaughn-Luma

Angeliki Jackson

(Images and whole article available at: http://www.creativebloq.com/photography/instagram-2131996)

Thursday 18 April 2013

Erik Kessels

Nowadays, family albums are very rare. Today you seem to find family photos online, on things such as Facebook and Flickr, instead of everyone keeping an album in their home. I feel this is a shame in some respects, there's something aesthetically pleasing about having a physical family album, with all its wear and tears. The images seem to hold more memories too, as they're once in a lifetime images, snapshots of a certain time in your life.

Album Beauty, an exhibition of found photographs curated by Erik Kessels, is an ode to the vanishing era of the photo album. Once commonplace in every home, the photo-album has been replaced by the digital age where images are now jpegs and live online and in hard drives. These visual narratives are testament to the once universal appeal to document and display the mundane. Often a repository for family history, they usually represent a manufactured family as edited for display. The albums speak of birth, death, beauty, sexuality, pride, happiness, youth, competition, exploration, complicity and friendship.

(Article and images available at: http://www.formatfestival.com/artists/erik-kessels)

The use of Social Networks.

Penelope Umbrico: Suns (From Sunsets) from Flickr, 2006-ongoing

This is a project I started when I found 541,795 pictures of sunsets searching the word “sunset” on the image hosting website, Flickr. I cropped just the suns from these pictures and uploaded them to Kodak, making 4" x 6" machine prints from them.

For each installation, the title reflects the number of hits I got searching "sunset" on Flickr on the day I made/print the piece – for example, the title of the piece for the Gallery of Modern Art, Australia, was 2,303,057 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 9/25/07 and for the New York Photo Festival it was 3,221,717 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 3/31/08 - the title itself becoming a comment on the ever increasing use of web-based photo communities, and a reflection of the ubiquity of pre-scripted collective content there. I think it's peculiar that the sun, the quintessential life giver, constant in our lives, symbol of enlightenment, spirituality, eternity, all things unreachable and ephemeral, omnipotent provider of warmth, optimism and vitamin D, and so universally photographed, finds expression on the internet, the most virtual of spaces equally infinite but within a closed electrical circuit. Looking into this cool electronic space one finds a virtual window onto the natural world.

Titles of installations to date:

2,303,057 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 9/25/07
3,221,717 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 3/31/08
4,064,589 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 9/02/08
4,109,500 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 9/09/08
4,786,139 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 1/14/09
5,009,279 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 2/20/09
5,083,088 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 3/06/09
5,332,272 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 4/22/09
5,377,183 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 4/28/09
5,537,594 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 5/30/09
5,858,631 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 7/26/09
5,911,253 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 8/03/09
6,069,633 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 8/27/09
7,626,056 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 7/17/10
7,707,250 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 7/30/10
8,146,774 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 10/15/10
8,309,719 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 11/20/10
8,313,619 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 11/21/10
8,730,221 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 02/20/10

(Artist statement available at: http://www.penelopeumbrico.net/Suns/Suns_State.html)

(Image available at: http://www.penelopeumbrico.net/Suns/Suns_Index.html)

But can this be classed as her own work?

Umbrico is taking other peoples images off Flickr and creating installation pieces. I suppose after reading her artist statement it's easier to understand her concept. It's not just about using other people's Flickr images but about how something so natural, like a sun, can be concealed in the likes of an online community.

Wednesday 10 April 2013

Martin Parr's The Last Resort

After seeing Martin Parr’s iconic work shot in New Brighton, you can kind of see the desired effect that people want to recreate in the digital age. His work is very saturated and spontaneously natural.

(Image available at: http://blog.zeit.de/fotoblog/2010/01/25/martin-parr-the-last-resort/)

(Image available at: http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/the-last-resort-martin-parr/)

Even though Parr's images have very in depth meanings about the British working class and can been seen as very controversial, on the surface, the colours and saturation in images can be seen as very aesthetically pleasing to the eye. I feel this is why Instagram, Hipstamatic and other apps alike can create images which could be seen as mode of "photography" because you can closely recreate a similar feel in your own images as Parr created in his, using just a mobile phone camera. I am in no way saying that there is a close comparison between an Instagram photo and the work of Martin Parr but you can see how people aspire to create images with a similar feel.

Martin Parr seems to be all about the snap shot and Instagram seems to essentially be all about the same thing. It just gives you the chance to share your snap shots with an online community and also tweak your images slightly with the use of correct exposure button and several filters.

(own image)

Some people seem to really hate Instagram.

Many a times I have scrolled through Facebook and seen people complaining about Instagram, whether it be about people's over use of hastags or over edited images. I'm all for Instagram but sometimes scrolling through my feeds, everything looks a bit too cliché or the same. Pictures of what you had for lunch, your newly painted nails, a picture of the sky line, your pet, what's going on with the British bipolar weather or you new "selfie" in the bathroom mirror.

Tuesday 9 April 2013

Is Instagram taking over?

Instagram is a very popular medium to display photographs and can also create aesthetically pleasing images, even within it's limited filters.
But is it taking over the commercial photography industry.

Traditional Photographers Should Be Horrified By The Cover Of Today's New York Times

Sports photographer Nick Laham recently shot some beautiful portraits of the New York Yankees baseball team.

The photos came out great, but what's surprising is that Laham took the photos with his iPhone, and "edited" them solely through Instagram.

Laham didn't need to use any fancy editing software like Photoshop to enhance the images. Instead, Instagram worked just fine.

Today, The New York Times featured Laham's photo of baseball player Alex Rodriguez front and center on the cover. Getty has even licensed Laham's Instagram photos on its site, suggesting that both the iPhone and Instagram are entirely suitable tools for photographers.

This is a problem for traditional photography. It used to be that you needed darkroom skills to make your photos look great. Then when things switched to digital, you at least needed to be able to make your way around Photoshop.

Now Instagram handles it all, and it looks great for editorial purposes. There's still going to be a challenge getting the great shots, and an iPhone can't handle a lot of circumstances. But the skills needed to make beautiful shots that are worthy of the cover of a newspaper continue to diminish rapidly.

(Article and image available at: http://www.businessinsider.com/photographers-using-instagram-2013-3)

Hipstamatic: More for the Photographer than Instagram??

"With the swipe of a finger, change your lens, flash and film, all of which add a unique touch to your photo."

(Available at: http://hipstamatic.com/)

(Image available at: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/12/hipstamatic-gentrifies-iphone-camera/)

Hipstamatic seems to be more for the Photographer than Instagram because you are able to manipulate the image more. Compared to the 20 or so filters you can use on Instagram, with the mixture of films, flashes and gels, Hipstamatic can help you create a wider range of images.

(Image available at: http://www.myglasseye.net/news/hipstamatic-review/)

"Hipstamatic is a photography company aiming to inspire the world to live more beautifully and creatively."
(Available at: http://hipstamatic.com/about/)

Nokia Moments

"Most of us are similarly, hopelessly nostalgic. We turn everyday events into "Kodak moments" -- and we spend hours filing, cataloguing, and scrap-booking them all."

(Available at: http://www.fastcompany.com/50517/mobile-nokia-moments)

Nokia wanted to be the Kodak of the digital age. Nokia introduced a program called Lifeblog which "gathers the mishmash of life -- all the text messages, images, and video that can be captured on a cell phone -- then organizes them into a digital diary. (ibid)

(Image available at: http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/Nokia-Lifeblog/1109232084/1)

Has Instagram created more photographers?

It's debatable whether Instagram can be classed as Photography or not. I suppose some "professional" photographers will be against the app as it kind of creates a short cut way of producing visually appealing images. It's very easy to see both sides of the argument when it comes to this idea that Instagram is Photography, it just completely depends who is taking the image and how it is manipulated.

These images are categorised as some of the top 12 images on Instagram.

(Images available at: http://mashable.com/2012/03/04/best-instagram-photos/)

Is Instagram the Best Thing to Ever Happen to Photography?

(Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBw589H2XwI)

Is Instagram overused??

There is a lot of controversy today about Instagram and it's users. Some people feel that some "Instagramers" overuse the site and it's tools, such as it's filters and frames. Instagram sometimes seems to be a place to document what you eat more than anything else. Making your food look more appealing by using certain filters.

(Own image)

Look at this Instagram (Nickleback Parody)

(Original video available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn-dD-QKYN4)

WHY INSTAGRAM SUCKS!

(Avaiable at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTHqTY9Tadw)

The Kodak Moment

"A Kodak Moment: a rare, one-time moment that is captured by a picture, or should have been capture by a picture."

Over the years the use of film and film photography has declined. The rapid increase of mobile phones, and those with decent cameras, has pushed aside the film camera and very much diminished the idea of 1 off images, the Kodak moment. Film photographs are seen as more precious than any other form of images. They are single images that capture a certain time that are irreplaceable and a one off. "Digital photography took off and Kodak wasn't ready for it. From the late 90s until about 2008 (which is also when camera phones became mainstream), the digital still camera market in the U.S. grew from 4.5 million units shipped in 2000 to 28.3 million units in 2007, according to PMA."

(Image and text available at:http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/21/what-happened-to-kodaks-moment/)

Instagram

Instagram is an online photo-sharing and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures, apply digital filters to them, and share them on a variety of social networking services, such as media sites including Facebook and Twitter. A distinctive feature is that it confines photos to a square shape, similar to Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid images, in contrast to the 16:9 aspect ratio typically used by mobile device cameras. (Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram)

(Image available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/reallyniceimages/8022882705/)

Today there are more than 100 million monthly active users posting more than 40 million photos per day. (Available at: http://business.time.com/2013/04/09/a-year-later-instagram-hasnt-made-a-dime-was-it-worth-1-billion/)

Instagram is used by ordinary people and celebrities alike. It is used to document important times, advertise events and products, plus the more stereotypical Instagram types, “selfies”, animal portraits and food images.

Photographing ourselves

I have chosen to base my blog and presentation on the idea of Kodak moments and a more up to date version, Nokia moments. To throw my own twist on these ideas, I am going to be focusing largely on the Phone app Instagram. I feel as if this is an even newer version of Kodak/Nokia moments; Instagram moments.

Tuesday 5 February 2013

Hi

This will be an ongoing blog as part of a year 2 module assessment for my degree.
I shall be using this blog as a way to present my research and analysis.
This research will assist a presentation that I have to give on an aspect of photographic practice from the 1960-present day.