There are articles where the headline can be a little more bold, especially when it comes to a youth-oriented topic like Instagram, otherwise the young things won’t even look up from their smartphones. It’s not as if I didn’t have the test subjects sitting in my own house, but you can certainly take the findings from the private test battlefield into the professional world. But of course it needs a bit more content than: “I’m playing with my buddies on the Playsie”. But that shouldn’t be a problem for someone who earns their living by creating images.
Anyone who pays attention to my social media activities will have noticed that I have increased the density of my Instagram posts enormously. A year ago, I was only involved in this to keep up with technology and to avoid being left behind by the children’s room crew. Then my ambition awoke and when I realized that you can’t just publish square pictures (I sold my Hasselblad long ago for a reason), my ambition and love of experimentation awoke. I also found a way to post directly from my computer, which removed the restriction to smartphones and opened the way to publishing higher-quality photos from my archive without any detours. Since the posts are also forwarded directly to Facebook and Twitter, my interest in not being active there also waned at the same time, and I also have the feeling that FB is slowly falling out of time and that too much unpleasant (right-wing) politics is being conveyed there.
Nevertheless, the question arises, why should a photographer show his pictures on Instagram? I’ll try to give you a few answers:
- Picture theft is relatively complicated and doesn’t really leave the smartphone ecosystem; the concern about unauthorized prints is rather negligible. Images are viewed and even find their interested audience via hashtags. This is comparable to Pinterest, but not quite, as anyone who has ever tried to download an image from Instagram can confirm.
2. photo and the name of the author, or at least the publisher, remain together. Since that’s the same person in my case, very good. This is what you dream of in other media, be it print or any other online medium.
3. traffic comes to your own website with just a few clicks, anyone who is interested really doesn’t have to search for long.
4. hashtags bring the images precisely to the target group of interest if they are used seriously and not just any hashtags that are supposedly current. This is because the pictures are not noticed in the corresponding stream, precisely because the hashtags are wrong. The community is quite sensitive to this.
5. with regular, high-quality photos you get attention from the target group and the opportunity to organically increase your circle of followers, and over time these will certainly include existing customers, which leads to regular awareness. Without being annoying, as people receive it voluntarily. But you have to keep at it, because you will be unsubscribed just as quickly as you check the “follow” box…
6. you can communicate your professional expertise in a specialist area through thematically stringent posts. However, I am of the opinion that you should also include something personal from time to time so that you are not forgotten as a brand and make it clear that these are your own photos and that you are not just posting thematically appropriate images of unknown provenance. Expertise, but with a personal touch. Of course, “making-of” pictures are always a good idea here, but they should be published with caution. Not because you would give away your special techniques. They are all well known and I hardly think that any of my colleagues are reinventing photography or entering a new era of shooting techniques that they don’t want to reveal in order to maintain their technological edge. That would be a rather ridiculous reason. Much more real are offended customers who want to publish the result of the photo production in their media. And they don’t want to communicate in advance to the competition what they are having produced in a photographer’s photo stream. That’s why you should always show “making-ofs” well after the actual image has been published. This should be clear, but it’s easy to “tattle” on something in the euphoria of a successful shoot.
7 In my opinion, however, the most important reason to regularly post photos on Instagram is a completely different, mundane but beautiful reason. You get praise. Spontaneous, undisguised, in clear words. Of course, we don’t just take the pictures because it’s our job. But because we enjoy it, because we love photography. It is our medium. And we want to show this in exhibitions, books, on our websites and in our customers’ publications. But which customer calls after submitting the files, thanks us, writes an e-mail about how satisfied they are with the result? Hardly anyone, because they often don’t have the time and sometimes, unfortunately, simply don’t have the style.
On Instagram, however, I see the “Likes” rattling off in the lock screen shortly after posting a photo, and that’s just fun.
Really, it can sometimes be so simple to make a photographer’s heart happy.
Addition:
On t3n.de, Martin Weigert has also given his thoughts on Instagram and adds further aspects to what I have said.
