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.

The newest filter available in Instagram v2.1, Sierra, has been a wonderful addition to our filter family. With a subtle pink tone and a wonderful big border, this filter looks fantastic with most subjects — from landscapes, architecture and portraits (both pets and people) to nature macros and even #fromwhereistand photographs!

While Sierra can be applied to many different types of photographs, we’ve found that it can make scenes that lack contrast or an even exposure appear more desaturated or washed out. If that isn’t an intended photographic style, you can simply apply Lux, our newest photo editing tool, to bring back some of that pop to the scene!

Take a look at these beautiful photographs that have used this new filter, and be sure to tag any of your own Sierra photos with #sierra.

Photos by matescho, yashualangeman, elem, candykay, eithnesusan & meerkatwoman.

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 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.

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.

If you missed the news, Instagram v2.1 is out and we’ve introduced a new feature called Lux. With a single tap, photos that are underexposed or lack contrast are instantly transformed. We’ve found that Lux is especially perfect for landscapes & cityscapes. Check out the example photos below to get a better idea of when Lux works best!

An underexposed iPhone photo of a building due to poor lighting from shade is transformed into a lovely detailed shot. Lux balances the exposure, provides much needed brightness, and the image really comes to life.

This already beautiful photo is significantly improved with Lux. The colors become brighter, details in the sign and tower are brought out, and the contrast in the sky makes the clouds pop.

The original image is your standard mobile phone photo - decent exposure, good color, and plenty of detail. But with the addition of Lux the colors become more vibrant and you begin to notice details that weren’t visible before. Lux truly transforms your photos …

… and with the addition of a filter, they can become even more beautiful!

Be sure to tag any of your photos that utilize this new feature with #lux in order to share your photos’ stunning enhancements!

If you’re running iOS 5 on your device, you no longer have to worry about losing that perfect exposure or focus if you need to move your camera around. With the latest iOS, locking exposure and focus is easily done with a simple tap & hold!

Just follow these steps:

1. Launch the iPhone’s default Camera application.

2. Tap the screen to locate the best focus & exposure. Avoid tapping on a location that blows out the image, like the subject in the screenshot below.

4. Once you find the subject that provides the best exposure and focus, you should tap then hold that location on the screen. When blue focus box surges and blinks twice you can release your finger.

That’s it! Your exposure and focus are now locked, and you should see the text “AE/AF Locked” at the bottom of the screen. If you try moving your camera around, this focus and exposure will remain constant. To remove the AE/AF Lock, just give another quick tap anywhere on the screen.

This is a great way to photograph an object that is constantly moving around (perfect pet photos, anyone?) or for setting exposure when shooting in the bright noon sun!

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.

Have you ever hit “Done” after editing a beautiful photo and realized, as it was uploading, that you forgot to turn on your share settings? We’ve all been there, but don’t worry - you can share a photo after it’s been uploaded!

Start by navigating to the image you’ve uploaded, tapping on the “…” below the image, then selecting “Share post”.

From there you can select the network you’d like to share to, or edit share settings. If you select Twitter, the URL for your image will appear in the space where you can compose your Tweet, as well as a character count so you know when you’ve reached 140 characters.

Once you tap the check mark, your image will be sent to the social network of your choice! 

Find information about sharing to Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and other social networks from our Support Center!

NOTE: The post below provides information on taking photos in low light on an iPhone. For Instagram users on Android devices, try Night Camera (Free), ProCapture ($3.99), or ProCapture Free (Free).

Capturing images in low light on an iPhone can be tricky, so we wanted to share a few tips & tricks in order to capture the best image possible in a dark scene!

Taking photos indoors without much light can often result in grainy, detail-less, and unfocused photos. While fill-light will help, the iPhone flash has a long way to go before it provides even and natural looking light, and it can often leave images looking like a scene from a horror film.

Applications

The 4S performs amazingly well in low light situations, especially for a phone, but for those of you who don’t have the latest Apple gadget, or do and you simply want to achieve even better low light results, there are a few applications that may be able to help.

Night Cam ($0.99) is a great application if you don’t always have a steady hand. It provides an accelerometer-assisted mode so that the shutter will only fire when the camera is stable, ensuring your photo is focused. 

 Slow Shutter Cam ($0.99) is the best application if you have a flat surface to rest your iPhone on.  When you open the app, the scene is noticeably brighter and the settings are simple to understand. It is especially great for taking long exposures in very dark scenes since it’s equipped with a bulb function.

Additional Tips

• Tapping your screen after you’ve perfectly balanced your iPhone can ruin the focus of your scene, and may leave your precious phone shattered on the floor. But, if you’ve upgraded to iOS 5, you can use your headphones as a cable release in order to take photos without having to touch the screen! Just plug in your Apple headphones, hit the volume up button while in the Camera application and voila! you have a great low light photo without camera shake.
• Get rid of low light image noise with photo editing applications such as Adobe Photoshop Express (free) or Filterstorm ($3.99).
• Buy a tripod for your phone. This iPhone tripod is sturdy, adjustable, transportable and only $5.99.
• When all else fails, put a filter on it! Inkwell can make a dark image feel moody (just make sure it isn’t too dark), and Amaro & Valencia can lighten up the scene to bring out some lost details.

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.

Though we’ve blogged about combining photos in the past, it’s one of the more common questions the Community Team here at Instagram encounters. Everyone loves combining photos! It can be used in so many different & creative ways, so it can’t hurt to share the fantastic applications that allow users to make beautiful diptych (or triptych) images once again.

Applications

PicFrame ($0.99), Diptic ($0.99), and PhotoShake! ($1.99) are a few of the regularly recommended applications.

Photo Tips

You can see some beautiful examples of these following tips in our blog Photo Tips: Combining Multiple Photos Into One, but here is a quick recap:

• Combine multiple borders of different shapes and sizes around a single image.
• Share a series of action photos in one image.
• Mirror a single image to create mind-bending and/or gravity-defying photos.
• Combine a #lookingup with a #fromwhereistand photo to give a sense of your surroundings.
• Place a close-up detailed photo next to a wide angle shot of the same subject.
• Clone your subject! Stand in one spot with your iPhone and take a photo of a moving subject while keeping the scene the same then combine the photos to make it look like they’ve multiplied.

We’ve even seen Instagram memes born out of diptychs, such as #topknotknack, started by @racquelmishel, which combines photos of top knots & knick knacks (or anything your creative eye can capture):

Photos by racquelmishel, isabellersss, cassysong, natspencer & maudemoiselle.

What are your favorite creative trends & applications for combining multiple photos? Reblog this post and let us know!

It’s that wonderful time of year when lights are twinkling in every city and suburb in preparation for the holidays! One way to transform your photographs of these festive lights is through a unique photography aesthetic called bokeh.

What is bokeh?

The word “bokeh” is a derivative of the Japanese word boke, which means “blur”. In photography this refers to the blurred area of the photograph. Basic bokeh photographs feature an in-focus foreground with a blurred dreamy haze-like background. When coupled with out of focus lights, this blurry background can create an illusion of large orbs. This technique can be taken a step further and the out of focus lights can be manipulated to appear as it has taken on a particular shape.

iPhone bokeh

The bokeh technique is typically reserved for DSLRs since it’s easier to achieve the desired results, however, it is possible to achieve this effect using your iPhone both naturally & artificially!

Natural iPhone bokeh

It’s somewhat difficult to capture bokeh with an iPhone without the help of a lens, but we discovered that a macro iPhone lens, which you can purchase via Photojojo or Olloclip, provides the perfect amount of blur to create a beautiful bokeh!

The image on the left transforms into beautiful dreamy orbs once the macro lens is used (and the Rise filter applied, of course).

Artificial iPhone bokeh

While the natural bokeh technique is great if you don’t mind an image that is completely out of focus, if you’d like to achieve some depth of field it may not be the best option. This is where applications can help. Two of our favorites for bokeh experimentation are iDarkroom ($0.99) and 美图秀秀 or ”Xiamen Meitu“ via search (Free).

The image on the left was edited using iDarkroom & the image on the right was edited with Xiamen. While artificial bokeh can be pretty, some applications can make your photos look very … well … artificial and may not actually enhance your photo.

Use the bokeh wisely, but have fun experimenting this holiday season!

Instagram Tips is a series that will feature Instagram-related pro-tips for both novice and expert users alike! Each section header links to Instagram’s Support Center, help.instagram.com, for more detailed information.

Comment notifications

You will receive a comment notification in the News tab when someone comments on one of your photos or mentions your username in a comment on anyone else’s photo.

If you have push notifications turned on you will also receive a notice of a like or comment on your locked home screen. You can also adjust which comments or likes are pushed to your phone so that way you’ll only see notifications from people you follow. You can find more information on push notifications in our help center here: Set up push notifications.

Tap & hold a username to reply

In any comment thread you can tap & hold a username in order to quickly reply to that user!

Delete comments

You can delete any comment you’ve left, both on your own photos and other photos, and you can also delete any comment left on a photo that you have posted, which includes comments left by other users.

To delete a comment tap the “comment” button below the photo, then swipe left or right on the comment you would like deleted, and tap delete! Note that there is no way to undelete a comment once you have removed it.

Edit a caption or comment

Have you ever posted a photo & realized there was a typo or you forgot to add something to your caption? While deleting the photo all together is an option, you can also tap “comment” and swipe to the left or right to delete your caption, then re-type and send a proper caption. Unfortunately, this will only work if there have not been any other comments added to your photo between the time you delete and repost, so you’ll need to quickly re-type your caption!

Should you need to edit a comment, you can follow the steps outlined in “delete comments” above in order to remove, re-type and re-send a comment you’ve left.

Hashtags

If your profile is set to public you can add hashtags to your photos in order to add them to a tag page with similar images! Hashtags are a great way for others to discover your photos on Instagram. Here are some hashtag tips:

• Private users’ tagged photos will not appear on tag pages.
• You can only tag your own photos.
• You can add a hashtag to your photo even after you’ve uploaded it with a caption! Just add a comment with your hashtag and it’ll be added to the tag pool.
• Numbers in hashtags will work, but special characters such as % or $ will not.
• Try to be as descriptive as possible. We limit the number of hashtags to thirty in order to prevent photos from being mis-tagged.
• You can tap on hashtags to see the tag page & discover similar photos or search for a specific tag from Profile > Search Instagram > Tags.