Instagram

Are you on Instagram? If you don't know what I'm talking about, then don't worry. It's an app that takes your photos and "retrofies" them. (I made that word up.) I enjoy taking pictures and sharing them, but don't have much patience for fiddling with effects to make them prettier. I decided to try out Instagram yesterday during some down time.

With Instagram, I can change the look of a photo with one click. It has several options for changing the lighting on your photo to mimic the lighting found in older, non-digital photos. There's even one called "1977," although I wonder why anyone would want to mimic that look.

Here are a few photos I pulled from my archives to test out some of the different looks. (Note: Russell took a few of these, so credit goes to him, too.) You may not notice a difference in some, but I've found it mostly darkens the background and makes the subject pop. {Honestly, I didn't have any super-artsy photos on my phone when I was fooling around, which seem to the be the type that suit this medium best.}

The Kids (in no particular order)

Moi

Other

As an example, I took this of my friend Amy yesterday, cropped it, Instragrammed it, and voila! This took literally five seconds, on my phone. Not an amazing photo, but for a iPhone shot during a viewing of the Super Bowl eating chili, I thought it was pretty good!