2017 January 1 was the day on which I posted my first picture on Instagram.

I thought I had an admirable collection of about 10 to 15 pictures which will take on the viral world of Instagram by fire. Not necessarily throughout the worldwide web but I was expecting a good surge of followers and some active name around the community.

For sure I wasn’t delusional but I thought of going into the labyrinth of photos with a strategy which could kick-start my photographic venture and support other parts of Soul O eventually.

Let me tell you this #tags are important, very important. I was not as aware about its use and most importantly it was surrounded by a lot of mainstream mumbo jumbo.

Personal use and professional use on Instagram varies quite distinctly. If you are using it like a social network to share photos on and beyond your friends you don’t care much about exposing your photos to the world, then use the #tags as you want and also it won’t matter if you do not use them altogether.

But professionally #tags associate your brand with a certain feeling, a community which connects with that feeling and most importantly, your specific and accurate tags help you be discovered on Instagram.

In simple words a search engine for photos. Photos which lead you to more eventually, but mainly you can really nit-pick to the minutest category and either display your picture to an interested party or find one to suit your project.

This convenience on Instagram which gives you the opportunity of being discovered so readily and an active visually driven community is what lured me there.

The app being easily accessible on our phone, it made photography even more convenient. So with that I decided to post one photograph every day for the rest of the year for doing 2 things precisely.

Practicing photography and building a community as each photo will keep my profile in the timeline of things active.

What happened from there is the point of this whole blog post.

First year on Instagram: Initial stage, consistency and something weird that I noticed

Throughout 2016 I was quite active in photography. Travelled a little bit here and there and the recent access to more gear and a new perspective was really shining out through all the photos.

So far Instagram had seem like a lot of untapped potential. I also used to see a lot of interesting work put out by my friends regularly on the platform. It’s square format, being majorly mobile driven and considering not everyone uses the same phone, the same picture quality and editing apps, the output of new found creativity was refreshing.

Being able to swipe through a couple of looks before applying one allowed everyone to try new things and be experiential in a situation where habit and skill guided the output. People found new love for black and white and colours really changed their hue for everyone.

It all started with a video, my first post on Instagram was a video. A video being something that I made for the first time. A gruelling 13 to 14 hours of shoot in all total in the shivering December cold. I started early out 5 in the morning.

A lot of first’s here.

Initial stage:

I had about 20 well-made photos, yes! I just counted and they were not just 15, which I thought will kick-start my
journey on Instagram and give me the initial boost required before I start posting straight from my phone.

Which clearly did not work out as you will see in the post later.

It was decided that once I run out of my stock photos, I will start shooting exclusively for Instagram using only
my phone.

Once in a while, camera photos do drip into the stream but that’s purely for sharing purposes and reminding people, that I also have a page just dedicated to photography and film-making on Facebook.

I used about 10 to 15 hashtags, I had some idea about how to use them, tagged some massively used hashtags and I was good to go. One post a day patiently. Nothing to hurry about here, I thought quality over quantity and why not I anyway did not have any more pictures to post as of now.

Consistency:

So apart from building a community on Instagram it was about practice. It was about making good photos consistently everyday.

The format chosen, which was one post a day, was going to make one thing evident by the year end.

Out of the total 365 days in a year how many days did I consistently work on my craft?

Secondly by shooting, editing and learning regularly for over the course of a year, it can improve my photography
considerably was my major intention.

A simple yet very effective way of keeping yourself accountable. How do you think you can use Instagram to keep yourself accountable?

By the end of the year you can clearly measure how active were you by the number of posts you have made.

Something weird that I noticed?

With every post I made, I gained and lost about 10 to 15 followers every day.
Yes! You caught that right, lost about as much number of followers is the real question here.

Are people so fast to judge and leave today, because they did not see what they liked yesterday?

Or there’s something else going on in the background?

The bot economy of Instagram

Online and offline bots. Automated and manual.

There have been banned services like Instagress, which allowed you to randomly, like, comment and follow people. No real appreciation only treachery.

Where your hashtags determine what sort of targeted engagement you are going to get. We all have observed our
Images being liked by unknown and unexpected accounts for no apparent reason.

With dumb comments like,

Quantity over quality and a race to instafame, instead of being a productive part of the community.

A platform to share personal stories and professional images should always be corruption free.

The users have the right to stumble across great content organically which they truly admire and the creators should get the opportunity to reach their appropriate audience.

However this bots follow you and unfollow you, if you don’t follow the host account back.

This has been my darkest discovery of the digital age, people outside the system are meant to keep the system in check and not add to the nuisance.

People are running behind instant gratification, you will be surprised to know and laugh at, that there are so called “Instagram spots” in the world and people make exact replica of images taken their to post on their own profile.

Reason being, it simply works. A moody photo of an Icelandic waterfall is all it takes for everyone to showers their likes even before looking. Tactics that work instead of moving things forward as an art.

This is in line with the click bait monster of the internet, read about what it is and how to fight it, to make the world a better place.

All this botting made my new found enthusiasm for Instagram a little dull, I felt like, will genuine effort ever get noticed?

Without going into further nitty gritty, I suggest you to read this article on How Bots are inflating Instagram egos published on the New York Times.

Use

Basic Instagram tips

This is for everyone, personal and professional users both. Reason being, to have a shot at a great opportunity by doing what you do every day nonetheless, by putting in just a little thought into your content and more work into your life pursuits, you can really shine out on a lot of avenues. Plus it’s motivating.

To have the sort of encouragement and accountability you get by using Instagram a little bit more seriously, in order to have great fun in the long run.

This can really help you move out of your comfort zone in life.

1. You can use up to 30 hashtags on Instagram and you should use all of them.
2. Your 30 hashtags should be a mix of wildly popular, known and rare terms amounting to just around 10k tags.
3. Apart from the description you cannot use links anywhere on Instagram. So my suggestion will be to keep the most important of all links there at all times. Eg: Portfolio, LinkedIn profile, website, blog etc.
4. Stories are creating a lot of engagement for us all if you have noticed. Use them to drive traffic to relevant places. Only verified profiles so far have the ability to add a link into their stories.
5. Like I said earlier, your #tags associate your content with a certain feeling and a topic, choose relevant tags, so as a search engine it helps interested people find you sooner.

Other than that, engage, appreciate and speak about things that matter.

You don’t have to write 30 hashtags every single time you post, just copy paste the old relevant ones and change the ones which you think are not relevant, done. As simple as that.

Earlier it was impossible to put full width photos on Instagram however as we all know now, that by pressing the highlighted button we can make a photo appear full size most of the times. Vertical frames still struggle, but by adding a border or expanding it using an app like Snapseed you can display your photos full length too.

I have seen a lot of meticulously planned and interestingly designed Instagram feeds. The beauty of your feed contributes to the engagement you receive. I personally don’t put much thought into it, I let my artistic decision about my photo guide its placement.

What’s your take on this?

Some general stats

Let’s have a look at my profile.

As you see above, out of the total 365 days, I have photographed for about 250 days. That’s a 115 less for a home run in discipline and consistency. That’s about 3 and a half months of inactivity.

We may think we are doing something regularly and yet if we just account for it, we discover that we have been lazy far too often.

My followers have crossed 280 and 290 thrice over the course of last few weeks, if not for bot activity it would have been in thousands, no thanks for spoiling the fun and honestly now I stand at 271, while I write this post.

Not that it matters but just for the sake of my little mental quirks I would at least have liked it to be 300 by the 31st of December, sadly that did not happen.

Partly because I rarely posted photos throughout the last 3 months. This is how you know that you are not putting in the required work.

I am a professional photographer now, 3 months of inactivity is like, 3 months of unemployment. That does not work, if I was working for someone I would have been kicked out by now.

The photo editing applications I use

Snapseed and VSCO. This are the two which make up my workflow on mobile.

Heavy hitters like adobe are not as efficient on phone. One of my friend did suggest an application by adobe, but I yet have to try it and therefore is not included here.

VSCO allows you to make or select a look for your photo and Snapseed allows you to refine it.
functions like curves and control points are a first to Snapseed and therefore I find it very useful. Curves are powerful.

You also get functionality like healing brush and selective tuning in there.

Android

VSCO

Snapseed

iTunes

VSCO

Snapseed

Art and inspiration

Art is a DIY project. Inspiration is what makes it happen.

Inspiration can strike when we are least expecting it and what we think is a clear evident idea could turn into murky recollections later on.

Other than the 2 clearly evident things which I learned during this year, a third one pops up in my mind, basic yet effective, the habit of noting down ideas when they come. Noting down inspiration when it strikes, the desire to do something manifested in letter when you note it down.

I use google keep, you can use anything you want.

This has been a major game changer and has kept me accountable and thinking. Thinking about things that matter and actively moving the process forward, until an output is visible.

Fun fact, everything in green is completed and with it my work for the year as well. Complete what you have to when you have to, so that you can start what you want to, when you want to. 

Earlier I had no intention of including this one in this post, but here listen to this TED talk by the author of Eat, pray, love on your elusive creative genius, she speaks about how inspiration and creativity strikes and how she makes the most of it.

The other 2 things which I learned during this year

Triptych

Here is what thoughtco. Wrote about Triptych,

“A triptych is a picture in three parts. The triptych is a very popular format in the arts for a range of reasons
and they’re designed to be displayed together as a single piece.”

“The word triptych (pronounced trip-tick) has its origins in the Greek ‘triptykhos’ meaning three-layered.”

When Dunkirk came around, it was in talks and one of the Nolan pages spoke about how Christopher Nolan, has made Dunkirk in a triptych format. Three separate stories made into one.

Now triptych isn’t a rare phenomenon and is used quite commonly, Instagram is filled with such feeds.

However information is inspiration and therefore I went ahead and tried some of my own.

DIY Light box

Another thing which I intended to explore was product photography. However as I do not have the budget for a full blown studio setup, I decided to look for something convenient, yet practically useful.

Using limitation as a benefit. A DIY light box usually isn’t big, can only accommodate a certain type of objects, pertaining to a certain size and therefore I had to visualize new avenues around small and mundane objects.

So far I have not used any black paper as a background, so white is all I had and I had to come up with unique looking images, with a different story, happening in the same place and made around everyday objects.

Creatively challenging, plus it made me really think about the light and its effect on subjects.

In my natural habitat which is outdoors, I barely need 2 clicks to get my perfect photograph. Inside that box I was struggling.

In art and in life you grow when your perspective is challenged and you have to think outside the box, while you yourself are in the box.

Here’s one of the tutorial that I followed to end up with my own light box.

Some images I made using the light box so far

2 simple things that I learned made me do things which I usually don’t. This work would not have been possible without a desire to act and experiment.

What do you intend to learn this year?

Whatever you learn, will make you do good or bad things which you usually don’t. So choose wisely.

Curious about the photographed books? checkout my book recommendation to know more.

Digital art

What is digital art?

The oxford dictionary defines digital art as,

“Art created or modified using a computer or other digital medium.”

With which we can conclude that the majority of things you see around you are digital art.

Say if you are a painter and now you have started painting on a computer, then that’s digital art.

The software’s help but your skill as an artist matters.

So some time ago I started learning digital art, I say digital, because apart from learning to draw and paint,
I also am learning to use the required softwares.

I have always wanted to bring my full imagination into creation.

Photography and filmmaking allow you to do that but that’s when you are working with a production house.
It also is a completely different medium.

Drawing and painting has its own charms and limitations could only be in your mind.

As soon as I get better at it, you will definitely get to see what’s on my mind. Until then, what little I have learned
So far and the use of a Wacom tablet gave me a chance to escape my existing editing workflow, with just a little bit
Of thought and intuition, I was able to breathe new life into old photos.

It also helped me play better with the light and shadows of a scene, what wonder little tweaks to the light can do is a lesson learned last year.

Travel, Vision, conservation and some major photos of the year

I had made a point to travel as much as possible last year, luckily it all worked out well. Travelling made me think about, how home is a feeling and not a place, things which we have heard a million times, suddenly make sense when the moment is right, more like an Aleph.

To me monsoon is a season of wonder and I did not intend to miss its glory that time around, also when I travelled to the north of India, in places like Himachal Pradesh, where nature was majorly unscathed, the quality of life and oxygen rich air made me appreciate its mountainous isolation.

It is when I returned to Delhi, I understood that the people who live in cities are fools. Even when I returned to Pune, Which is the 3rd least polluted city in Maharashtra, it felt like cities are majorly disturbed by sound, air and water pollution.

The condition of the capital city is a sorry state to see, endowed with the presence of one of the holy rivers in the nation, the Yamuna now mostly seems like a gutter.

As clean as everything appears in a city, underneath if you closely observe it seems stale.

Because of which conservation came to the spotlight more than ever before.

I am willing to bet that out of the 10 reading this, 8 have never planted a tree. Also, you cannot go around planting any tree, just because they inhale carbon-di-oxide and exhale oxygen but what we must really do is, plant locally beneficial trees.

If I find the necessary data, I will do a post about which trees to plant to suit your local eco-system.

Last year I focused on making my vision clear to create things which more accurately deliver the message. Not
Only in photography but in life as a whole.

So here are some major photos of the year and some which are hopping around the same themes.

Conclusion/Beginning

Beginning actually and not the conclusion.

I have been writing for 7 months now, Instagram being a visual extension of the conversation here.

The Instagram community is vibrant, creative and inspiring. Apart from the bot issue which now I completely ignore, I try to have meaningful interactions there about the stuff others are creating.

Whenever I find someone putting in the work and trying to become the best version of themselves, I appreciate that. And luckily I have found some people who do the same for me. That’s what it should be about, inspiring one another to do great things in life.

A lot can happen within a year if you just commit, it might seem like you are doing way less but when you will account for it at the end, you will notice that you have come across more than you ever thought off.

For 2018, I intend to get better at film-making. Maybe finish making the documentary I was working on first.
I did make some videos last year but it was only an initiation. What I want to work on this year is, exceptional story telling.

I have been very moved and inspired by great stories told through cinema.

This year, I want to get fitter, practice hiking more often, hike some well-known mountain forts around my city and continue doing everything which I started in 2017 with much more vigor and determination.

Apart from the feeble attempts I made last year to become an active part of the conservation movement, this year I will explore it even more seriously and see where I can contribute on my own level.

I will try to make more photographs which I never make and with it experience things which I never do.

I will also try to get certified as a mountaineer this year and take one step ahead on my journey to Everest.

Apart from the little alterations I make to my photos using digital painting, I will try to bring forth some actual art in front of you this year.

Where my shabby attempt at learning has brought me, makes me excited about what if I really become the student I need to.

To this New Year my fellow comrades, a year for better exploration, a year for experiencing life better, a year dedicated to learning, a year when I think we have more power to change than we previously had and a year meant for us, the new work force which will eventually start shaping the world.

And therefore I think, before we start shaping our world, we should start shaping our vision.

This year on Instagram is going to be all about that and more. I hope you join in the conversation too.

I wish you an adventures year ahead. May we find what we are looking for.

Tell me what do you intend to do this year?

Adios 2017!

To the flowing dreams and good times we are about to have.

Last video of the year by me. 

I wish you all the great things ahead, Happy New year, let’s make things happen.