Instagram • InstaCity: Portland

InstaCity: Portland

InstaCity is a blog series that introduces you to local Instagram groups around the world. Portland InstaMeet organizer @grether shared some details about his city’s meetups with us. Want your city’s meetup group featured here? Write us at instameet [at] instagram.com.

City: Portland, Oregon

First InstaMeet: January 2010

Next InstaMeet: On January 14, a photowalk around the Hawthorne shopping district.

What we do: We’ve had dinner at restaurants, photowalks on the Willamette river or around the Eastside warehouse district, and most successfully, just relaxing in a big pub and shooting the breeze about new camera apps or phone accessories (like cases that connect to tripods and such).

Attendance: The biggest meetups we’ve had were 18 and 20 people, and the smallest was five.

How we organize: We use three things for organizing the events: meetup.com, our Facebook group, and posts within Instagram itself.

What makes Portland unique: We have a lot of very quirky, tech-savvy people willing to dive into new apps and new tools. Nothing is off limits. I think part of it is that with all the misty rain, we tend to spend a good amount of time in coffee shops huddled over our iPhones for warmth. Also in general, the populace here is extremely quirky, as the documentary series, Portlandia, illustrates. (What’s that you say? It’s fiction? Oh.) Anyway, that makes for excellent street photography.

All this is combined with the absolutely stunning beauty of the area. Not only is the city itself so lovely, nestled up against rolling, forested hills along two major rivers, but also it is a short distance to giant, ice-covered volcanoes or the beach or excellent wineries or rain forests. All sorts of weird animals and plants grow here too. I suppose all the misty rain produces oddities.

Photos from Portland