Why Hating on Instagram is Stupid

I’m making this blog post because I have read several things recently that amount to another round of hating on the immensely popular Instagram.

Here’s the bottom line: This is a photo of Lake Crescent on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, taken with my phone and processed and shared with Instagram. All told, the process from capture to broadcast to the world took less than five minutes, a good portion of which was spent tagging and slowly uploading with a slow 3G connection.

It would be another eight hours or so before I pulled the card from my DSLR, pulled the images off the card, edited the image in Lightroom, uploaded the image to Flickr, and finally shared the image on Facebook. By then, tons of people had already seen and commented on my Instagram photo.

Instagram detractors focus too much on your camera phone’s technical limitations, and not enough on form, content, composition, and/or light. Even aside from those things, it’s hard to ignore the social advantage of something that can eliminate so many steps–barriers–between taking the photo and sharing it with others. Photos are visual communication.

I don’t often hear people complaining about the pencil sketches of great artists or lamenting how quick sketches and charcoal studies are ruining art. Yet that is one of the functions that Instagram can serve–documentation of a place in particular light–visual shorthand for a return in better light, a sketch for an idea, whatever. It can also, of course, serve as the finished piece in its own right.

And the kicker? The DSLR version isn’t even that much better.