Instagram is one of the easiest ways to save and categorize surf photos that you want to take.
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I show you how to do it on an iPhone in the video, and the Android app works in exactly the same way.
Resources
Download Instagram here:
iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/instagram/id389801252?mt=8
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.instagram.android&hl=en_GB
Instagram’s documentation for the collections feature is available here: https://help.instagram.com/274531543007118
Inspiration
If you want to hear a professional surf photographer’s views on Instagram I recommend listening to Rambo Estrada, a New Zealand based surf photographer, on this podcast: https://player.fm/series/series-2418560/create-thumb-stopping-instagram-content
I have a list of surf photographers, with links to their official websites and social media accounts, including Instagram, here: learningsurfphotography.com/surf-photographers
Find the Surf Photographs You Want to Take
I’m often asked about the type of equipment that people should buy for taking surf photos, could be cameras, lenses, housings everything across the board. I’ve used a lot of it in my time, so I am in position to be able to recommend in most cases, but the first thing I ask back is “what type of surf photos do you want to take?”
Often the reply will be quite general ,it’ll be “I want to take lots of fun type photos in the water” or sometimes it’s specific “I want to take photos of my kids learning to surf” something like that, so in order to get to that point where you’ve got something specific, and therefore you can really work on exactly what you need to get in terms of the equipment to get the right results, the first thing you need to do is figure out exactly what you want to take.
I’ve developed a bit of a process which I think will help you refine exactly what type of surf photos you really like to take, what I recommend doing is, if you’ve got a smartphone, and I’m guessing most of you will have, get on Instagram, if you’re not already it’s easy to sign up, it’s free and they have this really good feature which is bookmarking different photos.
Bookmarking Images with Instagram
Instagram is a great platform for browsing images because you can search by tags, you can find photographers that you really like and you’d like to emulate the style of, and you can follow them. There’s lots and lots of different ways of discovering the millions and billions of photos that are across Instagram, so what I’d like you to do is get onto your Instagram, let’s start by looking at surfing as a hashtag, and we’ll see what we’ve got.
We scroll through the results of our hashtag search on Instagram, and if you find a photo that you think “yes that is the type of surf photo that I’d like to take” then you just tap the little bookmark icon in the bottom right of the screen, and that’ll save that for later, so we can work with that one.
Don’t put too much thought into it, don’t overthink your selections at this stage, I’d want to get maybe a hundred, that might sound like a lot to some of you who don’t use Instagram very often, it might sound like nothing to a lot of people who use it day in day out, and use all the functions of it, so hammer through a bunch of feeds, don’t just use surfing as a hashtag use anything that interests you, you might for instance want to do a search for “surf school” or “surf competition” if that’s the kind of avenue you’re going down, or you might want to go for I don’t know “over/under” or “split shot” if that’s the kind of thing you like, “underwater” you know the idea.
There’s lots of different ways to discover things on Instagram and no doubt you’ll go down a few rabbit holes and you’ll probably end up liking or following a bunch of photographers which is good as well, because you’ll get some more information along the way, but once you’ve got maybe, let’s say a hundred at least of those in your bookmark folder, this is the key bit, you want to go to your profile, then you want to tap the menu icon in the top right, and then you want to go to your saved items, and there’s two tabs, one of them will show you everything that you’ve tagged, and the next one is called “collections” and this is what we’re going to use to categorize all the surf photos that you liked.
Obviously, if you use Instagram a lot you might have lots of others in there that you’ve bookmarked for whatever reason, but you can easily go in now and filter those out because you can create a collection for each style of surf photo, so personally I’ve got I’ve got a handful of collections. I’ll show you on the screen, some of them might be long exposure surf photos, some might simply be line up shot, and then other ones are going to be very specific to a certain style and it’s not immediately obvious sometimes which section it would fall into in that case you can put it into two, so there might be an action collection that you set up which includes fisheye photos and includes long lens photo shot from the beach and then you might also have a long lens section and obviously that photo would be included in both in a long lens and action, but you might have another one that’s long lens which isn’t an action, perhaps it’s just an empty wave breaking, or you know something scenic, so you get the picture, essentially you’re gonna have 100 or more, ideally as many as you like on Instagram over maybe a 30 minute period, or however long you’re doing it for, all of those categorized into different collections and what this gives you is a really good way of going in and finding out what the trends are in what you like to see.
Say for instance most of the shots that you really liked ended up in a collection that was called “fisheye”, “GoPro”, “wide-angle”, whatever you happen to call it, but essentially it was really wide-angle photos with everything in focus, empty waves, people in them, lots of different times of day, but the fact is they’re all wide-angle and they were all shot with a similar piece of equipment.
What you might find is, it doesn’t, your collections don’t naturally fit into a piece of equipment that was used, but often they will, so throughout this course I’m going to be explaining which different types of photos are possible with which different types of equipment and you’re going to be able to refer back to your collections in Instagram.
Ideally it’s going to be in your pocket wherever you go, you’re going to be able to flip through and find, ah yes, so this section is relevant because I have a collection with 30 photos in it all about wide-angle fisheye photos.
You might find you’re very widely spread across the board, you have different photos, in which case, I mean the bad news is you might have to get more than one piece of equipment, or a big spread of equipment, or one specific piece which can be used for lots of different things and if you’re really focused on one piece, one collection and one style of photo in your collections, you find you’re gravitating towards that, that’s good news because you can really nail down exactly what equipment you need, and you can get the best of the best and work out how to use it really easily.
I’d recommend you do this now, but also you might want to go back and revisit it, the great thing about Instagram is there’s new content literally every second, there’s millions of new photos being uploaded and you’re going to see some of the best photos from around the world of surf photography, and obviously everything else, but surf photography in particular, and so photographers are huge fans of Instagram, obviously it’s a visual medium so it’s going to be one of those places where they congregate, so you’re going to see some amazing photos there, and it’s your turn to take advantage of that and then you can really nail down which ones you want to emulate and we’ll come on to it in the rest of the course how you go about doing that and what equipment you need.
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