Adventures in the Grid

I don’t think I’m obsessed by grids but I am using the 3 across grid format as an integral part of my Instagram post lately. Sometimes is just posting three similar items but I do has several 1by3 or 2by3 panel mosaics in my post recently. I wonder of they confuse by viewers, (I have had a bit of a drop in followers) or is it a bit of a hassle to find the grid display.

There are actually many tools and apps like Instagrids that can help prepare the grids but they all suffer from the instagram restricted api and fact that images have to be uploaded individually from a phone or mobile device.

There are many others doing great work with grids on their instagram profiles. The biggest issue being right now. there is no common hastag or icon to indicate a picture is part of a series so the casual browser needs to recognize the photo being display may be part of a grid series and click on their user icon to get to their profile. This is not a natural action for those thumb scrollers that I notice everywhere these days. Still those in the know with a bit of time to stop and appreciate the grids there is some wonderful creativity going on

I’ve settled for the hashtags

#1by3grid  #2by3grid  &/or   #triptych

When an image spread across several adjacent squares

See you on the grid some time soon.

Thinking Outside the Frame

This photo was almost an after-though, since I hadn’t taken a daily photo to post on flickr. I did take a couple of others but came back to this one as it summarized where I had “misspent” by photographic energy. You see I’ve become a little hooked on the idea of making the 3 column grid view in Instagram work as a secret place to display bigger images. In a strange twist this humble image made it onto explorer and there have been 1000s views over night. The real hero is actually over on Instagram @oz_endless_summer, and is meant to be promoting my photo project next year.

I first got the idea looking at making a photo of water lilies into a more painterly image. I knew Monet created a few large painting that needed to be displayed together. So it was not a big step to split my panoramic view up into 3 square images. I probably really confused my followers but slowly I can see they are starting to look at my grid view.

I have since found that there are a few others doing similar multi-panel posts and even found a tool called Instagrid that will do the splitting. However its a bit tedious to use because Instagram doesn't let 3rd party apps upload images so the individual panes still have to be manually uploaded via an official Instagram supplied app. Anyway I’m having a bit of creative fun