It’s a holiday in the U.S., which means most of us will be spending the day with our families. And that means our cameras will be used more than usual.
Before you head out for your BBQ, check to see that you have Instagram on your phone.
Unfortunately, I think it’s only available for iPhones, so if you don’t have one, I suppose you can stop reading now. Or skip down to the link Instagram has on their blog of photos from the Joplin tornado.
But, if you do have an iPhone, and you don’t have Instagram, go to the app store and download it now.
Go ahead. We’ll wait. It’s free. Don’t worry; I’m not sending you on some “pay lots of money so I can read this blog post” chase.
Instagram is (from their website):
A fast, beautiful, and fun way to share your life with friends through a series of pictures. Snap a photo with your iPhone, choose a filter to transform the look and feel, send to Facebook, Twitter or Flickr – it’s all as easy as pie. It’s photo sharing, reinvented. Oh yeah, did we mention it’s free?
The cool thing about it, really, is the way you can transform your photos instantly, before sharing them.
There are 16 different filters that you can choose from, which also add tones and even borders on the photo.
The photos of Jack Bauer used above show the original, the 1977 filter, and the Earlybird filter.
Pretty cool, huh?
Same photo, two different filters, many ways to share it.
If you want to see something even more cool (and heartbreaking), check out the blog post they published after the Joplin tornado (even if you don’t have an iPhone, you can look at this). There are seven photos, from local residents, that were posted through the site.
The ability to share, instantly, makes us even bigger citizen journalists, sharing parts of our lives we historically had to rely on traditional media to share. But it also shares the human part, which traditional media never has been able to share.
So, now that you have a cool new tool for the camera on your iPhone, have a happy Memorial Day holiday.