As a recent Instagram convert, I quickly realized I needed more photographs to post than just those in my portfolio. In fact, there aren't enough second-tier photos to post an image every other day for a sustained period.
This gave me two thoughts:
- I need to take more photos!
- I need to go through my archive and find some forgotten gems.
I wrote recently about giving new life to old photographs through editing. With my start on Instagram, I made a point of really digging even deeper though my archive and finding photos that were at least half-way to good and have the potential to be better.
How I prepare images for Instagram
- Interesting images get marked with a red colour flag in Lightroom.
- The selected images are cropped to a square format.
- I play with the crop to get the most interesting composition, especially in photos that were originally taken without the intent for publishing.
- All of my older work is in colour and digital, so I decide if a black and white conversion is beneficial.
- I use a Lightroom export preset that reduces my images to 1000 pixels along their length, and save them to a dedicated Instagram folder.
- The folder gets sync'd to my iPhone so I can post the images away from my computer.
- Used images get moved to an 'Instagram_used' folder.
This gave me a little buffer of images I can use for now, but it is clear I need to get out and shoot more on a daily basis.