InstaMeet Tips: Icebreakers

With over 250 communities participating in the upcoming Worldwide InstaMeet, we wanted to give you some tips for connecting with the folks you meet at your city’s photowalk!

InstaMeets are a great way to get to know the people in your hometown using Instagram. To help you branch out and get the conversation flowing with your fellow Instagrammers, we’ve put together a few tips to keep in mind before, during, and after your photowalk.

Before

  • Bring nametags: Hand out nametags and ask everyone to write down their name & username. It helps connect faces to photos!
  • Use a hashtag: Ask everyone to tag their photos with the same hashtag so everyone can easily find each other’s photos on Instagram. We recommend making your tag unique by using the name of your city in your tag, such as #instawalksydney or #instawalktoronto.

During

Chances are you’ll have a lot in common with the people around you. Be sure to use the opportunity to get to know them! Here are some questions you might want to ask to get things started:

After

  • Follow your new friends! Be sure to check out the tag page for your city and follow the people you met on your photowalk.
  • Don’t wait for the next Worldwide InstaMeet! Instagrammers in cities around the world get together all the time to go on photowalks or just meet up in a bar. You can organize a big meetup in your city or just go out shooting with a few of the new friends you made any time of the year.

Weekend Hashtag Project: #tinyhorizon

Weekend Hashtag Project is a series featuring designated themes & hashtags chosen by Instagram’s Community Team. For a chance to be featured on the Instagram blog, follow @jayzombie and look for a photo from her announcing the weekend’s project every Friday.

This weekend’s theme was #tinyhorizon, which asked participants to pull back their focus and capture a big sky with a small horizon line. Every Monday we feature some of our favorite submissions from the project, but be sure to check out the rest on Instagram here.

Photos by timothyschenck, angeline716, clintus, shauna610, ashleycakesomara, diyosacarter, darmix87, jackiejaszka, cyrenakh, kkuiper, analeko & hiimanet.

The Week on Instagram

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by danielgatsby

foggy alley of trees, by informo

blownaway @laurenstaud, by allielujah

by hawaiiana

Winter Trees, by ovan

I love this picture so much, by grahampage

sock! monkey!, by amyseeley

Exploring the Venice Canals, by laurennicolelove

by fieldoffice

The swimming hole, by twoeightnine

a one girl parade…, by lotusfly

I watch you grow old. I sometimes forget we were once young; well, we still are., by youngcreature

Featured: Singer-Songwriter Ed Droste of Grizzly Bear

Name: Ed Droste, @edroste

Bio:  I’m in a band. We’re called Grizzly Bear. I love travel almost as much as music.

Location: Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA

Singer-songwriter Ed Droste of Grizzly Bear is on Cape Cod with his bandmates recording a new album. Ed has no computer with him, but he does have his phone. He uses Instagram to share small glimpses into the band’s recording process. On his feed, you’ll see late-night photos from the studio as well as beautiful shots of the landscapes that surround their isolated Cape Cod house. Together, Ed’s photos tell the story of his album’s creation.

While recording, my bandmates and I are staying in an old drafty house on Cape Cod, without neighbors for miles. My bedroom often gets the heavy SE winds. The door is old and barely stays shut on a still day, so I’ve learned each night to rig it shut with a heavy boot tied to the knob, draped over an old chair, that’s then pulled back. It’s done the trick so far but is generally annoying!

I first started using Instagram as a way to share photos with friends while on the road in SE Asia. It wasn’t until this winter that I started to poke around more and discover all these amazing other people taking fantastic photos. You leave a few “this is great” comments here and there and sometimes a conversation strikes up. This is how I came to “meet” @trashhand, who not only has been so supportive of my photos but also helped me navigate the rocky road of editing a picture. He follows so few people I decided to check out some of the people he follows and got to discover amazing work from a variety of people, some of whom I enjoy saying a friendly hello to daily. I also follow friends back home and some fans who’ve commented on my photos and whose photos I liked.

After music, travel is my number one passion. I’m lucky to have a job that allows me time to travel and takes me to new places. I love feeling lost and disoriented and out of my element and am always game to try whatever street food, even if I do get a lil’ sick. I don’t own a house or apartment or a car. I’m very happy constantly moving and get restless easy, so I choose to spend a lot of my time traveling and exploring. I’ll never get sick of it, and luckily my husband @chadmcphail feels the same way. I plan to share photos from life on the road once we’re finished recording.

Be sure to follow Ed’s Grizzly Bear bandmates Chris Bear (@crbear), Daniel Rossen (@drossenbro), and Chris Taylor (@cee_taylor) on Instagram for more photos!

Photo Feature Friday: New York Fashion Week 2012

For the past week New York City was the center of attention in the fashion world while New York Fashion Week was underway. With over 300 designers presenting their fall 2012 collections, there were plenty of behind the scenes and runway photographs shared with Instagram through the tag #nyfw. We were even the lucky recipients of a Fashion 2.0 Award for the “Next Big Thing in Tech”!

Take a look at some of our favorite images from NYFW 2012 below.

Photos by thewallgroup, amtendler, melissachrisp, bfa_nyc, oscarprgirl, omgitsmeg, wsj, harrybeeenyc, bryanteslava, _frommetoyou, eholmeswsj & shamphel.

Photo Tips: Stick with A Theme

With almost 200 communities participating in the upcoming Worldwide InstaMeet, we wanted to provide some photography tips to help you make your city’s photowalk unique!

Subjects

Select a subject that is easily discoverable on your photowalk’s route. Can you plan the walk so you pass only tall buildings? Are you able to find multiple windows with hand-painted letters? Perhaps there’s a lot of street art in your city! Pre-planning your walk, picking up on common subjects, then providing that subject as a theme will challenge photowalk participants to see subjects that may otherwise go unnoticed!

Filters

Utilize only one filter on every shared photograph. While this can be a huge challenge, having a visually cohesive theme will result in a beautiful hashtag pool for your city’s photowalk, as well as your personal photo feed. Try asking participants to utilize only the new Sierra filter with a border, then share any obstacles you come across as a result while you walk along!

Props

Photograph the same prop interacting with multiple scenes. Ask participants to bring similarly themed props to the photowalk, like vinyl toys or fake moustaches, and provide them with unique situations that they should photograph their props in. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to see a photowalk hashtag filled with mini toy dinosaurs taking over a city?! The only way to answer that question is with an all caps “YES!”.

These ideas aren’t just great for creating a fun and interesting photowalk - they can also be applied to your own photography! Challenge yourself to stick to one (or several) of these themes for an entire month. Not only will your Instagram profile look beautiful, but you’ll likely learn a thing or two about photography in the process!

InstaMeet banner image provided by @lauralawson.

Instagram Tips: Using Hashtags

Instagram Tips is a series that features Instagram-related pro-tips for both novice and expert users alike! Check out the Support Center, help.instagram.com, for more tips & help for Instagram, including basic information on how to use #hashtags.

Adding tags to your photos is a great way to find new followers and share your photos with more people. But hashtags can be tricky. To get the most out of them, you’ll want to keep a few things in mind. We’ll use this photo of a beautiful 1966 Volkswagen van as an example!

Be Specific

Choosing specific tags will help you connect with other like-minded people on Instagram. For this photo, instead of using the tag #van, we could use #vwvan. The photo will be added to that highly targeted tag page, where other Volkswagen lovers will be able to find the photo more easily (without sifting through photos of Toyota Siennas and Chevy Astros).

Be Relevant

Make it easy for other like-minded Instagrammers to find you by making sure your tags describe your photo. Using very general tags like #photo might get you a few likes, but with over 700,000 photos tagged #photo, it isn’t the best way to make your photos stand out and connect with the people most like you. Relevant tags will help you attract new followers who will take a genuine interest in your photos and continue liking and commenting on your photos over time. For the photo above, in addition to #vwbus, we could use the tag #volkswagen.

Be Observant

Pay attention to the other hashtags used on photos that use the same tag as yours. You may discover a popular hashtag you hadn’t thought of on your own. For example, on photos tagged #volkswagen, we can see that many of those photos also use the tag #vw. When you do a search for those tags, you’ll find out that Instagrammers use #vw to describe their Volkswagen photos more than twice as often as they use #volkswagen!

After tagging the photo with relevant and specific tags, you may also find that people sharing photos similar to yours are using even more specialized tags that you hadn’t thought of originally. For our photo, we found that photos tagged #vw and #vwvan also use #vwbus.

Do you have any tips for tagging your photos? Reblog this and let us know in the comments!

The photo at the top of this post was taken by jameswagner.

How I Shoot: Reflection Photos, with @dylanisbell

How I Shoot is a series where we ask Instagrammers to tell us about their photo-taking processes. This week, @dylanisbell shares his tips for taking reflection photos.

Camera: iPhone 4S

Vantage Point: For me, New York City is like one big fun house of reflections. My attention is constantly drawn to all the storefront windows with the dynamic ways the light bounces off buildings or spills through alleyways. Windows give you a lot of options, but as a starting point I find that if I like the scene behind me (the scene that’s being reflected) and the scene on the other side of the window, then I start to move my camera and body around to knock out certain elements that I want to reveal or hide. So think of your phone and body as a layer mask that can either hide or reveal an element.

Shooting: As far as what catches my eye, I would say New York City does. I’m pretty lucky  I guess, with all that’s going on in the city with people, light, reflections. I just try to pay attention and hone it all in and capture as much of it in one frame as I can.  When I approach these reflections, I do so with a motivation of what I think is possible, but what also attracts me to these reflections is the unknown. I am just as surprised by what I find as I hope others are. Without waxing too philosophical, for me these reflections resemble a bending of the rules of what is known to my basic visual perception of life. It’s kind like I’m trying to figure out or communicate with all these elements. 

Editing: I always use the built-in camera app to take my pictures. After I take the picture, I have a few apps that I might use to edit it. I usually use Camera+ to bring out features in the image, and I use Lux to bring out elements in the photo that otherwise might get lost. Finally, I choose an Instagram filter and then share the photo.

Want to share your advice for taking photos? Reblog this post and let us know in the comments! Or include a tip in the caption on your Instagram photo and use the tag #howishoot.

Weekend Hashtag Project: #portraitsoflove

Weekend Hashtag Project is a series featuring designated themes & hashtags chosen by Instagram’s Community Team. For a chance to be featured on the Instagram blog, follow @jayzombie and look for a photo from her announcing the weekend’s project every Friday.

In honor of Valentine’s Day this weekend’s theme was #portraitsoflove, which asked participants to grab a friend, family member, or significant other & take their portrait. Every Monday we feature some of our favorite submissions from the project, but be sure to check out the rest on Instagram here.

Photos by idly_bri, jess_marvelous, diejaco, mermaidism, orangesparrow, srt4shawn, scottatlynda, a_jassin, amrichardson, elanuroglu, nalismo & johnnyhifi.

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Morning!, by dailyreds

Not Alcatraz, by colinprice

feathered friends, by josheinwechter

by carmynjoy

Road block, by themeep

 

Restocking Walmart, by einwiller

Bristols new ferris wheel. Nice prop to the surrounding scenery!, by axlif

 

Pots, by rchptch

#building #sierra, by yjsk

Long-Distance Paraders, by shahkashani

Onward and upward, by deluda

End of the line, by bsterling