Monday Memories: a Return to Instagram and Food Photography

It was this photo (above) that resulted in me giving up posting to Instagram just over a year ago. It didn’t happen straight after I posted the image, but a couple of months later when Lara asked me for the high-res, DSLR version of the image for a magazine story. But there was no high-res image. I’d never taken it. I was too busy feeding the Instagram beast.

There was, however, another reason. Instagram had been bought by Facebook, a company I loathe, and I had deleted my Facebook account months ago after a social media project where I thought I would need it finished. It’s not for me.

However, given that our work is generally driven by good, old-fashioned print assignments and that the ink drying on our print articles and photos for magazines tends to fall way out of sync with where we actually are, I recently decided to start posting photos on Instagram again.

To be honest, I missed the instant feedback resulting from posting an image of what we’re doing while on assignment. I can quickly see which images resonate with viewers on Instagram and while it’s not going to alter the shoot for a magazine client, I do pay attention to what images get the most likes. Why wouldn’t you?

Over the past 12 months we’ve also become much better at managing our time on shoots and interviews – even if we do tend to turn 30-minute interviews into 90-minute ones, we’ve still allocated time to taking a few snapshots to post to show you what we’re up to.

I think “Instagram works best in close up using details to capture a mood or feeling,” to quote Peter Springett, who had some nice things to say a few years ago about my use of the tool, when he wrote about a series of food shots I took documenting my laksa making experiments.

There’s been some stunning food to photograph – not to mention eat – here in Singapore (although we haven’t tried nearly enough laksa) so check out our food-tastic feed here.