In Which I Rave about Instagram

I'm WAAAAY behind the times, I know. I should have been raving about Instagram 18 months ago, right?

Instead, I've only been raving about Instagram since April. April was when Instagram first became available for Android phones. And now I rave about Instagram.

The accessibility of artistic tools is really important. One of my academic interests is outsider art, ranging from the medieval period's affective piety to contemporary fanfic, and I am all for putting the best tools into the hands of every single person everywhere, and then letting them do whatever the hell they want with it. That's why I also love good camera phones--you tend to create with what you have, and you always have your phone with you. And to combine a good camera phone with professional-quality photo effects? It really has reinvented the art of photography.

dissecting flowers

Even with a wonderful camera that hangs around my neck most of the day, I still take tons of Instagram photos of our daily lives:

kid looking at flower parts through our Brock Magiscope

biking home from the library after a tea party in the Children's Dept.

painting on the front porch

 

I also had a LOT of fun editing on the fly photos from our road trip last week:

St. Louis City Museum

driving and driving and DRIVING!!!

crossing the Arkansas River at sunset

kid taking a photo outside Laura Ingalls Wilder's house

And now that I'm home and my external hard drive is on the fritz (oh gods of computer hardware, if you just fix my external hard drive this time, I swear I'll invest in a back-up storage device right away!), I used some of those same Instagram photos of the City Museum, the ones that I took with my phone after my camera battery died, in tomorrow's CAGW post about the City Museum. 

I can guarantee that I wouldn't have posted grainy old old-school camera phone pics on any of my nice, beautiful blogs!