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I’m two years too late on doing a free for all on Instagram.

A free for all is when you give out for free a set of photos. By free, I mean without copyright using perhaps at most an attribution license.

Here are the steps:

1) Create an image announcing the Free For All. Make sure the age has the hashtag of your event on it.

2) Recruit Ambassadors to promote your free for all using the image you created in step 1. Be sure to give them copy that states where they can find the free images, and that they need to use the hashtag to participate.

3) Be sure the ambassadors have a clear post date, start date & end date for the free for all.

4) Put your free images publicly linked and accessible on Dropbox or a similar service.

5) Announce the free for all along with your ambassadors.

6) During the free for try to give a shout out each day to edits you liked from your collection of free photos.

7) At the end choose a winner and runners up if you want.

I really messed up on recruiting ambassadors for my free for all. If I had gotten 20 ambassadors I would’ve gotten more followers. I had only a handful and so ended up with 134 new followers in a week when I usually only get 10.

This is my Lightroom Workflow for making photos for use on any social media.

I will show you a before and after that I use primarily for landscape photos.

First, I export out the RAW files from something like iPhoto into a folder.

I drag the contents of this photo onto the Lightroom icon or open up the folder in Lightroom. I then select the photos I want to import. Then, I select a photo to edit.

I will start out with this photo.

Next I do the following:

• click on “Enable Profile Corrections”,
• adjust white balance (This can really make or break a RAW photo but won’t do much in JPG),
• adjust contrast and exposure,
• adjust the tone curve, and
• adjust the sharpenss.

The first and last step are key. When you take a photo with a DSLR, the photos are not sharp but softly diffuse in RAW format. Without post-processing you cannot get the same kind of sharpness that you might from a film camera with the same setup as your digital camera. Here is a before and after showing just how important the sharpening step is.

Enabling the profile corrections will adjust any distortion that your lens causes, e.g. a curved instead of a straight horizon. In the past this was a painstaking process to fix that might take hours. Now you can fix it with the click of a button.

Here is the final image.

I lost at Instagram in all the ways possible when you think of social media.

Let me first say that I had real friends before the Internet and before cell phones. We hung out almost *everyday*. To me that was / is real friendship. When did having a light capturing device become a pre-requisite for friendship? It is now. You also need to have a cell phone to have friends in the 21st century. Doesn’t this strike anybody as totally wrong? Am I the only one?

When Instagram first launched, I thought it was the best thing ever. It was the app that Flickr should’ve made. It boggles me that you can have 5000 people at a company doing nothing. Facebook is like that now and Instagram is headed there, too. When I heard Kevin Systrom and Josh Riedel were headed to a bar in downtown LA to meet LA users, I jumped at that chance. I remember talking to them about startups and the potential for a big startup in LA. I told them I was the lead developer at an app company. There were two ladies that they were more interested in talking to so I don’t blame them. This is how I first lost. I knew the potential of the app, and I failed to connect in anyway meaningful with these innovators.

A few months later, I had a chance to apply at Instagram and be employee number 7 or 8. Some douchebag recruiter from Twitter who was now working at Instagram never gave me a chance. This pissed me off to no end. I ended up working on an app called Via.Me. It ended up being the number 2 uploading app, so I definitely had the chops to do the work there. This is the second way I lost at Instagram.

The biggest and most painful way I lost at Instagram is like the 50 or so actors and actresses that never got an Oscar but should have. Yes, Gary Oldman, I’m looking at you. You totally deserved one in so many films. I never became a suggested user, and never will. When I found out that it was a word of mouth thing where suggested users could suggest other users, I thought I had a chance. In fact 3 friends asked that I be suggested, but this never panned out. I’M SO FUCKING SORRY I NEVER WENT TO STANFORD YOU DOUCHEBAGS THAT MANAGE “COMMUNITY.” I remember the first time I met Sam Graves. I gave him a ride to a meet up in Tennessee Valley. A photographer I knew was talking about needing a second for a photo shoot while I was walking with her. The moment Sam heard this he literally pushed me out of the way so that he could try and take this job from me. Sam Graves is the biggest douche bag ever and is destroying photography. He makes photographers think that if you do social media well, that is doing photography. He has turned Instagram into a Hollywood club populated by sycophants and whores. He also buys followers, too.

Yet, this guy, a total douchebag, beat me, and became a suggested loser. I played it on the straight and narrow and utterly failed to touch the heart of anybody at Instagram with my personality or art.

Where do I go from here? I can only continue to push myself further and harder. Although, I totally despair of getting the recognition I yearn for, I think I can learn to be my own ultimate source of validation. Like the old prophets of Israel, I will renew myself in the wilderness. This is a wilderness where folks with 20k followers on Instagram don’t want anything to do with you anymore even though you used to be “friends.” This is a wilderness where you are no longer competing with other Instagrammers but with the great photographers and artists of the past. Compared to Ansel Adams, I am a loser and am okay with that.

The short answer is no. Do not unfollow anybody you are following on Instagram because it will reduce your follower count.

If you look at this historical chart from IconoSquare, you can see that anytime I did a mass unfollow of “Followings who don’t follow back,” there was a huge unfollowing back of those who followed me or those I had reciprocal follows with.

The key take away is that you should be really careful about who you follow. If you do unfollow a large group of people, 25 or more, there is a ripple effect to people that are your reciprocal followers!

When I was living in Venice, California, a really good friend gave me some great advice. “Stay away from the film industry and you’ll stay sane.” I followed his advice, and I still have very positive memories of Southern California. Unfortunately, for my sanity, celebrity has come to Instagram. A gossip and celebrity magazine, Enstarz, has declared that Dan Bilzerian is an Instagram celebrity. This should be no surprise to anybody that has followed Youtube or Vine which have produced their own celebrities. In fact if you are a top 40 Youtuber, you make at least $1 million (USD) per year.

The film industry is pretty brutal for its stories of backstabbing and allegiance to the bottom line at the expense of art.

Hollywood and everything bad about it has come to Instagram. The more money that brands pump into Instagram marketing will only make this more true. Instagram has rooftoppers – one died from a fall – and selfies at Auschwitz as a trend. The only thing missing is an annual awards ceremony replete with red carpet and paparazzi.

Most actors in Hollywood only make $5,000 per year, and have a second job. Most photographers are doing a bit better at $28,490 per year. But at the upper tier, the rewards are very great. This is why competition is so fierce. Competition is so fierce that editors at influential fashion magazines have to compete for Instagram likes.

Can you have community when everybody is dead set on a Hollywood kind of success? It’s really tough. I won’t say no since I did make one friend in Hollywood. However, people move to Los Angeles for the weather and to be famous, not for the community. You could say the same is true of Instagram with its popular sunset hashtag and stories of overnight fame. In fact, a brand paid $5,000 for a photo to be published on Instagram.

The problem with chasing fame is the same thing as the problem with chasing money. No matter how much you chase, you need more. It’s really hard to be happy with what you have. For my sanity, and for yours, too, dear reader, I totally recommend staying away from the trappings of celebrity.

Here’s what you can do instead:

• Shoot film – shooting film slows you down. You have to be more careful about your shots. There are no redos.
• Give yourself a photo assignment. Instead of focusing on getting more likes and follows, shoot a series of photos as part of a photo assignment. I really liked the book and movie versions of Solaris, so I shot a series of black & white photos with the hashtag, #solarisbw.
• Take a break from social media. This is tough, but you actually find that at least some people missed you.

A photographer produces photographs. These can be sold, and if you sell one, you are a professional photographer. Photography is a trade. A photographer uses sales and marketing skills (now often in the form of social media) to sell photographs. What Instagram makes you forget is that photographs are used by brands to sell.

Many Instagrammers are the unwitting branders, marketers and sellers for companies that make millions, and they all do this for free.

Instagram is a private enterprise. If you have photographs that are at odds with their TOS, they can – with totalitarian silence – remove you from the “community.”

If you feel someone in the IG “community” was very nice to you and then backstabbed you, and they do photographs related to brands, it is because how paid social marketers are in Instagram is the same way actors are in Hollywood. They have a nice side they show to the world, but they are ruthless in order to get the fame and wealth they want.

What is the optimal strategy then? Personally, I do not think people who do Instagram or photography for a living are really happy, or are artistically satisfied. As a professional social media marketer on Instagram, your client wants photos of rather ordinary stuff, *and* puts you in conditions with crappy lighting, *and* wants those Instagrams *NOW*. The optimal strategy is finding something that supplements your *real* photography which has standards outside of likes and follows.

I was inspired to write this piece based on what Ken Rockwell wrote as well as Jenn Herman whose latest blog post shows that there are 3 types of Instagram accounts: brand, business and personal. The key to being happy is knowing which kind of account you are running. You cannot be all 3 without running into conflict, e.g. you can’t have a personal account be fully authentic without sometimes coming into conflict with your account as a brand. The brand will always demand a message for marketing.

If you are not running a personal account, and you are in America, Instagramming as a social media marketer means presenting happy, fantasy images with sublime landscapes of a mostly middle-class and young America that does not exist, so that capital can move. (Most young people are poor here and have been since the Great Recession.)

Photography has always depended on spaces like Instagram. It has also always depended on public spaces, too, like museums. But more and more photography is being oppressed by capital and law enforcement. Lots of young photographers think street photography is illegal, which it’s not in the United States. Many police officers treat photographers as criminals. The thing to ask is, “Who is your photography serving? God? A state police? A free peoples?”

Following people on Instagram is very similar to what you would find at the Tudor court or in at a networking event in Silicon Valley.

The people in corners do not need to mill about. They have the power, and like the king or queen, their focus is limited to a few.

The people not at the corners nor seated are milling about. They are working for some sort of gain by working the room. This can be seen when people follow lots of other people.

Ultimately this means that photography, the art, has become conflated with the machinations of courtly ambition.

This offends democratic sensibilities on so many levels. Being a queen’s favorite should not make you a better artist than someone else but this sort of perversion of aesthetic judgment is built into Instagram.

I really like this film. It’s great for random scenes that you might find while out for the day.

The latitude on this film is very wide so you can shoot from ISO 400 to ISO 12000.

Here is a sample of Portra pushed to ISO 3200.

Here’s Portra 400 pushed to ISO 12000.

“Instagram is not photography… It is not a photograph unless you print it (on paper).” I first heard this idea from André Herman. This sort of photographic traditionalism or conservatism employs a subtle metaphysic. How could this be true? It is true in the sense that before photography not every portrait was considered a painting. A certain intent and symbolism is required to transform a portrait into a painting.

Yet there is more than just a classical metaphysical distinction between a portrait and a painting, and a mobile snap and a photograph, respectively. Social media and consciousness of an audience is always in the background. A mobile snap cannot be divorced from branding, marketing and technology as well as the quotidian Zeitgeist of the Internet.

A photograph will lack the enumerated background of a mobile snap but invites the pantheon of traditional critique and avant garde institutions.

When I create a photograph, given that I learned photography in the 1990s, I am always comparing it to the masters. My photographs are always already – to use the Heideggerian phrase – not good enough.

When I Instagram, big data analytics comes into play. I can always do better through social media optimizations. It doesn’t have to be art.

Betty 1998 by Gerhard Richter