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Instagram!

Last week, my sister Karen introduced me to the iPhone app Instragram, and I am completely hooked. I mean I cannot stop playing with this thing that turns ordinary pictures into interesting pictures. It turns plain old snapshots into photographs. Have you noticed people normally reserve the word "photograph" for really great looking pictures, and they use the shortened "pics" for the more pedestrian shots? I take pics, but Instagram turns them into photographs.

While walking around my sister's acreage the other day, I took this snapshot (on the left) of her husband's tractor. So, what. But when I ran it through Instragram, I created the image on the right—the dirt miraculously turned into patina.

And I snapped a picture of the little log house that used to be a play house for her kids, and with the app, it now looks like the spider-infested creepy thing it really is.

She has a lovely house her husband designed—it's modeled after a traditional farm house plan. I ran the plain picture through Instragram and got something more dramatic, and then ran that one through again to get the Amityville Horror house.

Last summer, Eustacia, my mother and I toured a historic village near Small Town, and the kid used my iPhone to take some pictures. With the app, you can modify older photographs stored on your phone, so I ran some of them through and got these ghostly images, which really help place the images in the 1800s, I think:

This dormitory was part of the historic village—I seem to have deleted the original, but by running the same image through the app several times, using different filters each round, I was able to create a variety of effects:

Now, every time I look at something, I wonder if it would make a good Instagram image, and I snap my iPhone camera just to see. And if I find myself sitting idle for a few minutes, and my iPhone is in reach, I pick it up and go straight to Instagram and dig up some old "pic" to see what marvelous "photograph" I might create.

Comments

dive said…
That's too much fun, Robyn. I'm so glad I've not got an iPhone; that kind of thing would take up all my time.
10:31 AM
savannah said…
i think i'd get an iphone JUST for this app, sugar! xoxox
11:28 AM
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