In Hashtag Authentic, social media guru Sara Tasker provides tips, advice, and guidance on how to turn your personal Instagram account into a profitable creative outlet.
Since setting up her Instagram account (@me_and_orla) while on maternity leave in 2013, Sara has become a celebrated influencer and iPhoneographer, and through her calm, atmospheric, and authentic style has garnered legions of followers. Here, Sara presents the lessons she has learned along the way.
Sara's nurturing voice and enchanting photography provide guidance on:
storytelling, with tips on finding your own visual style and personal niche;
making pictures, including composing for Instagram, finding the best light, and getting the most out of your camera phone;
archiving your life, with tips organized by themes like Craft & Making, Family & Pets, and Food & Ingredients;
and sharing your world, detailing the keys to Instagram success and beyond.
Hashtag Authentic is both an inspiring manual and an interactive tool for finding an online voice, growing a tribe, and becoming an influencer.
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We make images to see clearly, then we see clearly what we have made.
Wright Morris
It’s one thing to find the pictures we want to take. Making the result on the screen accurately reflect what we are seeing can be another skill entirely – what to include, what to leave out, what the light is doing, what the angles mean.
When I was little I used to dream of taking pictures with my eyes. A long, slow blink to capture anything, exactly as I could see it, with none of the difficulty of finding a camera and persuading it to play along. I could never understand why the pictures I took on my camera – a yellow plastic one I’d received as a gift after having my birthday party at a fast-food restaurant – weren’t as wonderful as the scene I’d had before me at the time.
The truth is, our eyes do only half the work. When we look at a scene – a smiling infant, a colourful parade, steam curling from a coffee mug in a shaft of afternoon sunlight – our brain does a series of complicated manoeuvres to enhance our focus.
In Speech Therapy I was taught that babies cannot distinguish background noise from important voices. It’s why having the TV or radio playing can be bad for an infant’s language development; they miss precious exposure to their mother’s speech among the hum of household activity.
In many ways a camera shares this naive, open approach to the world. Our camera has no discernment or filter for what is of interest or what is before it. Like the eyes, it simply sees – it is up to us, with our brains, to control, filter and adjust what it records. To make sense of the chaos and tease out the meaning.
In this chapter we’ll get into the practicalities of doing that – with whatever camera you have at your disposal, and whatever skills you already possess.
These days it feels like Photoshop makes almost any image possible. Auto modes on cameras are more reliable than ever before, post-production software can correct a whole world of errors, but there remains one element of photography that cannot be faked, cheated or skipped over along the way: the art of composition.
Get it right, and you’ll find your audience will forgive any technical missteps. Fail to master it, and no amount of post-production tweaking or filter application will make your images really sing. Composition is the beating heart of any image. It’s the nuanced thing that makes people look and linger and feel, and it is the simple bare bones of the picture, the scaffolding that holds it all together.
COMPOSING FOR INSTAGRAM
If you plan to make Instagram your main sharing platform, it’s worth sparing a moment to consider the way your work will be seen. Just as an artist might make a commission to fit the space where it will be exhibited, we can make subtle adjustments to our photography to help it stand out or to create maximum impact on the end user’s screen.
For Instagram, we know that almost everyone will be seeing it via their smartphone app – Instagram regularly release statistics that make this very clear. Very few users are browsing from a laptop, say, and the ‘desktop’ site offers limited functionality besides.
This app-heavy user base means we know our audience is essentially looking through a small, handheld, portrait window to see our images – and if they’re anything like me, that ‘window’ can often be scratched, smudged or in need of repair!
So what does this mean for our composition? Well, perhaps that very small, fine detail might easily be missed, and that imperfect quality or resolution might be more easily overlooked. As screen sizes and resolutions increase (and the glass becomes less smashable), this will probably evolve to become less forgiving, and the bar will be raised. Indeed, already, early smartphone images that displayed fine in the initial days of Instagram look noisy and grainy on modern screens.
It’s worth remembering, as well, that the app only ever displays content in portrait mode – meaning that users only ever hold their phone in its upright position, and see everything on a tall and slim screen. It stands to reason, then, that horizontal or landscape images shared on platforms like Instagram tend to see statistically less engagement – in no small part due to the fact that they command substantially less screen space. A landscape image can appear as much as two thirds smaller than its portrait counterpart (see the examples opposite) – with direct consequences for how engaging an image is, and how much other distracting content gets seen alongside it.
Of course, that doesn’t mean we must only ever take portrait images or video – but when shooting for Instagram, it often pays to consider what sort of screen space our finished product can hope to receive.
On top of that, we’re all increasingly guilty of having a short Insta-attention span. Most users spend only a second or two looking at every image, double tapping to like and then moving on.
