Sara tasker, 2019
The book is about advices to start to share the images of your life, on Instagram or any other platform. Knowing your motivation (you’re not here to please the others), finding your niche, taking photographs, and others.
The book is not very long and contains many photographs. So if you open it only once, it is not worth it.
I didn’t really like it at the start: There is too much “blabla”, sentimals stuff, before you get the real advises. It was a little bit boring. But advices are good to take.
The book is easy to read. Each sub-chapter is about 3 pages, so you can read this book whenever you have 10 minutes to chill.
There are “exercises pages” where you have a lot of questions that may help you to define your goal, how you are perceived to help defining your scope. To get the advises, just look at the table of content.
I will not detail all the chapters, (there are too many), but only keep the essential things to remember. There are three main parts,
In the end, this book taught me about the basic things for making nice photographs. When I take photograph, I now think twice. Otherwise, I won’t teach you much things about IG, how to get a large audience, etc.
A phone allows to document your life. There are stuff you are likely to forget.
Moments, not things. These photographs resonate.
A picture speaks a thousand words. However, adding text allows to remember some details you cannot remember.
To analyse a photograph, you can ask a set of question, starting with “what, who, why, where”. Find if there is anything odd.
Style: If you start posting on a blog, or on Instagram, you may start it as a hobby. However, you can have the ambition to be an “influencer”. In that case, you may try to please people, to get more attention. This may be less enjoyable after time. Being the real you makes stuff easier. Please yourself first. If you have no idea, look at the things you commonly take photo of. Select the ones that you love the most.
Compare yourself to yourself to improve, not to the biggest stars.
Finding a niche is also a good direction to take, to avoid finding people to compare to.
Our lives are made up of the things that we do, not the reasons we get started on doing those things. Do it for the photo, for the art, for the creativity, but never for the likes.
There are plenty of tools to edit images, on phone or on computer. Use them, but do not abuse of them.
Don’t overthink: it kills creativity
Optimize the light: daylight is the best. Artificial light may give weird colors. Take advantage of shadows.
Interestingness factor:
Post analysis:
Photographs with faces attract around 30-40% more likes than regular photographs.
If you take pictures of your child / your dog, no one sees who is with him all the time.
Also, photographing ourself allows to control our image, to learn how to pose, and get more familiar with ourselve. Usually, very few photo are good. Training help to get more good pictures. Plus, you can take thousand of images. It is not like with old school camera. You can try again and again. Study how the other do.
If you want to learn how to use single lens reflex, the advice of the author is to stick to one lens, for a few month, so you can learn how to use it properly.
#WHP: Weekend Hashtag Project. Find a topic to shoot.
On this part, the author review different topics you may want to cover: Craft, Cooking, Travel, Celebrations, Beauty, Home, Pets, … For each topic, you will find advices, and very nice picture that illustrate how you can artistically shape your work.
For crafts, documenting the work in progress, the time it takes, the mistakes are good stuff. Life is not perfect.
For food, post before lunch time. Presentation count.
Use geotagging: it helps for getting visibility.
Add caption to give context, things you are likely to forget. On the book, you have a list of questions that may help to create a nice caption: Feeling ? Experience ? How can this help ? The story ? …
Protect your life:
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