OkDONEthis: Negative Space

I was having a lot of negative thoughts and emotions yesterday. After seeing this photography prompt from OKDOTHIS, I figured, if I'm finding myself in a negative place, why not explore negative space. See what I did there?

By the way, if you consider yourself an iPhonographer, and don't have this app yet, get it. It's a community of photographers who create prompts for each other and share their results and their vision. Its really a wonderful idea. (Unfortunately, it is available for iPhone only, at present.) If you get your hands on the app, you can follow me @mikelancaster.

Attention Seeking: Two Weeks on Instagram

Here's a little-known fact about me: I'm really bad at self-promotion. I tend to focus on getting work done, rather than showing off. However, when you're talking about artistic endeavors, getting attention is part of the work. I joined Instagram about two weeks ago. You have to go where the people are if you want to be noticed, after all. After two weeks with the service, here are some things I noticed.

- The experience changes greatly depending on who you follow. As with most social media, following people who don't post interesting stuff just means you get bored.

- There's way too much emphasis on getting followers quickly. This is a bit of an odd complaint, since I signed up to get my work noticed. My first 3 days were really fast paced. I posted a few snapshots (like the one up top here) and some shots from my portfolios. I was getting likes and followers quickly, but when I looked into the people following me, I found that many of them had shared 7-9 snapshot images and had thousands of followers. There bio information said that they had a surefire method for getting more followers. All I had to do was go to this website and...[Nope]. As an interesting point, all of those "increase your numbers quick" people have stopped following me as of now.

- The photo filters still don't do it for me. I've tried many apps that have the photo filter thing as part of it, and I usually don't like any of the filters. The header image for this blog post does have Snapseed's "grunge" filter applied, mainly because I thought it looked interesting on the barrel of the lens, but in most cases, I like to adjust individual elements of an image, rather than to just apply a filter.

- Applying hashtags is changing the way I think about keywords. My keywording on photos is usually sparse and only relates to how I see the image, or what I was thinking when I made it. When attempting to apply hashtags, I find myself asking different questions.What's another word for the thing I'm thinking? In what searches do I want my image to appear?

Overall, I see what Instagram can be good for, and I've enjoyed the idea of posting behind the scenes stuff as I'm working or setting up a photo shoot. I'm going to stick with it. We'll see what happens.