Okay, so maybe the number of photos I have been taking on Instagram lately is a little excessive but you see I just bought a smart phone for the first time in my life, actually I just bought a phone for the first time in my life. I paid for it. Every penny that it is worth I paid up front. Previously I have taken the bait of a free phone with a contract, which was great until my Blackberry died in a tragic gravity related accident (I feel on it while riding my bike and it stopped accepting incoming calls). I had eight months left on my contract and decided to go with an old phone my dad had lying around — which despite three years of use by him looked spotless before I got my grubby little hands on it.
Phones in my mind were a bad deal. They are expensive and I will inevitably break them — or perhaps if I cared more about them then I would be more gentle. The worst phones, usually old school flip phones, can take anything you put them through and I love them for that.
Smart phones are also big and bulky, and don’t fit in girl sized pockets — boys do not have this problem but if I doesn’t fit in my pocket it is not worth using.
But then smart phones are amazing. They can do so much. As the end of my contract approached I started to consider getting a smart phone and then I found out about Instagram. That settled it.
Angry Birds I could do without, but Instagram. That I had to have. Ever since I was a kid if someone handed me a camera I would go crazy snapping pictures and loved every minute of it. Instagram plays on the same instinct and combines it with social media — although I keep my Instagram posts to Twitter because that is the platform for people who really want to know all of the little mundane parts of my life, oh and get cool links.
And the photos turn out awesome. Instagram takes an average photo, with a cellphone camera of varying quality (I am finding mine to be a bit more of a wide angle than I would like), puts a cool filter on it (guaranteeing that it will look cool), and makes it square. Photos look fantastic square. I think that is the true magic. If you take an average photo and use a square crop on it it suddenly improves in quality — kind of like accents on boys, or the teen girl movie makeover effect.