January 1st, 2016. I decided to take a dramatic step with my instagram account (@_lukeadcock). I decided, in some ways as part of a New Years Resolution, to post a picture every day, and to start taking my 'photography' more seriously. I've had instagram since 8th September 2012 (back then I was @Luke_Adcock_), when I posted a picture of the Olympic stadium. But I didn't really understand the hype back then. I wish I had, mind. I wish I'd gotten into instagram and photography a long time ago. Alas, I didn't. I didn't use instagram again until 19th July 2013, a picture of myself and my then girlfriend. Cute, right? I was just starting to delve into a new social media realm and didn't really know how effectively instagram could be used. I used it like just another generic social media. Let me summarise a few of the posts that followed:
20th July 2013: A picture of my cat, Spike, & a picture, not taken by me, of myself and my then girlfriend at our year 11 prom.
21st July 2013: A picture of my favourite videogame, Skyrim, artistically displayed next to a PS3 controller, & a picture, from google images, of Nacer Chadli, a player who had just signed for the team I support, Tottenham.
22nd July 2013: A picture, terribly taken, terribly edited, of a row of silhouetted chimneys from my back garden. This was the first picture I took with the intention of being 'arty' on instagram.
23rd July 2013: A picture, terribly taken, terribly edited, of my garden, taken from a worm's eye view. It might've been good if it wasn't blurry, & a picture of my girlfriend playing Far Cry, & a horrific selfie of myself. I've been told that in this particular picture I 'look like a lesbian'.
24th July 2013: A picture of my subway sandwich. It doesn't even look nice.
So, in essence, I posted a couple of pictures of my girlfriend, a couple of pathetic attempts to be arty, an unappealing takeaway meal, and a picture of a footballer from google images. Not to forget the lesbian selfie.
I did slowly get better however, as I started to appreciate instagram as a social media. However at the time, instagram's editing features weren't particularly interesting. They offered some shocking filters and borders, and pictures could only be posted cropped into squares. This didn't help my below par photography skills and frankly I only keep the pictures on there for the memories. And so I can compare and see how far I've come.
I gradually started to take instagram more seriously and by the end of 2013, as I started to post pictures that were actually half-decent. These were sadly alongside a plethora of embarrassing selfies and below-par pictures of food. *shudder*. Looking back at it now as I write this, I genuinely took a lot of good pictures during my 2013 holiday. These were, sadly, diminished by the shocking edit I seemed intent on ruining each of them with.
The photography skills were starting to take shape; if I may say so myself, I've always thought of myself as quite the photographer. (Sound conceited? Good, I meant it to sound that way). Unfortunately I continued to post selfies, unappealing food and pictures that aren't worthy of an instagram feed any more than they are a tweet (in the social media hierarchy, I value an instagram post far more than a tweet. Sorry twitter). An example of this is a picture of my girlfriend playing football in the back garden. This didn't need to be posted on instagram, it would've made a perfectly good tweet. I'm getting defensive because I'm so proud of my current instagram feed. This wouldn't make the cut nowadays. Not unless I took it much more artistically and edited it well.
Back to judging my old instagram posts (I'm slowly working my way from bottom to top. I'm moving forward in time. I'm heading into the second half of 2013 now. Oh, here's three very nice posts in a row: A shot of Kings Cross, some artistic stairs, and a sunset down a London road. Good job late-2013 Luke. Sadly they're followed by two tragic collages, one of my new Spurs shirt and another of Saints Row. I love both these things, but why did I need to collage and post them in such a cringeworthy manner? And after a few more nice pictures, there's several pictures of me posing with Madame Tussauds waxworks, a dodgy looking roast dinner, and some very low quality pictures I must've thought looked good at the time.
I start to improve big time at this point - heading into the end of 2013. Some nice pictures from a day out at the Shard... I spoke too soon. A number of bad pictures of myself and food followed. Why Luke, why.
I'm gonna stop myself here. In essence, my pictures got better and better. I started to post respectable artistic photos, but never losing my temptation to post pictures of my face or food. So much food.
So here we are where I started. 1st January 2016. I stopped the selfies, the food, and decided to post solely good-quality, original, artistic photos. I'd been posting good artistic pictures in recent months but they were interjected with content that I wasn't happy with, pictures of me, professional pictures of nights out, just stuff that I wanted to cut out so I could focus my instagram purely on my photography. A few accounts I'd seen made me make this decision: @tobyziff, @osilvr, @ell.ot. They likely don't know who I am, however I saw the quality of their feeds and the pictures they took and this made me want to run my instagram in a different way, and I've been loving it. I've posted at least one picture every day, without fail, this year (I posted a picture of a chocolate log on the 2nd January, and later regretted it, so it's gone now. But it was there). You have simply to look back at the couple of months and you can visibly see the extent to which my pictures and photography skills have improved. Friends of mine know me as the instagram guy, the one who takes arty pictures. Sometimes I get abuse for it, but I don't care. It's become a full-time hobby of mine and I'm soon going to be buying a proper camera. Instagram has been a great outlet for my creativity and I have no plans to take my account anywhere but up.
