Instagram

One recent fad I have noticed recently on social networking sites, such as Twitter, is the Instagram application for smartphones. Everytime I log onto Twitter, my feed is scattered with “I just posted a photo” tweets from my friends. I was unsure of what exactly the point of this application is, but after some research I found out that it is simply an app that allows one to choose from several different filters to put on a photo before sharing on a social networking site. A few things about this application annoy me. The first is the filter fad. All of my friends post pictures that look a hundred years old, and are blurry and poorly lit. I’m not sure why is it so popular to post terrible quality images of one’s daily life on Twitter. The second thing that annoys me is the content of the photos. Aside from the weird filter, I have seen more pictures of unrecognizable glasses of beer or bikes than I ever cared to view. It’s almost as if the ability to post pictures with instagram is so tempting that my friends will take a picture of anything, even if it’s completely boring and irrelevant to anyone else’s life. The last thing that annoys me is the sense of self-promotion I know will be apparent in some of my friends. Newflash: Putting an unoriginal filter on a picture you took with your smartphone does not make you a photographer in any way. Just because you used an app made to make your pictures look “cool” does not mean you have any real knowledge or skill in photography. Anyone with a nice camera or editing software on their computer can create nice looking images, but it takes more than an SLR and a hobbyless existence to be a photographer.