Photography for Instagram: Capture and Share Your Life

1. Introduction: I think in my photography I'm always drawn to the positive side of things. Life isn't always as straightforward as it might look on Instagram. For me, it's about finding a peaceful moment, or a beautiful object. It's about focusing in on the small moment, rather than looking at always the bigger picture. Hi. I'm Hannah Argyle. I'm a photographer. I live in a town in the UK which is isn't the most beautiful place. I was looking at pictures on Instagram of incredible landscapes, and amazing places, and beautiful buildings, and I didn't have access to take those shots. I've very much narrowed my world and focused in on arranging a few small objects by a window, looking for the best light in the room or going out on a foggy morning. Social media is filmed with glamorous before going to glamorous places, and I'm neither of those things and don't often go to glamorous places, so you don't necessarily have to go far. In this class, we're going to look at taking and editing photos for social media. I'm going to show you how to use manual settings because I think that's really important to understand, and we're going to go out and I'm going to take a self-portrait and edit that for you. What we'll be learning today anybody can get involve with, even if you don't have this camera that I'll be using. Thank you very much for joining me and let's get started. 2. Chronicling Your Life: When I first started taking photos of myself, I did it for a paid job. I was mortified having to be in my picture as I was really uncomfortable with it, but it was the first time I ever use my tripod and went out and took photos of myself. Since then, it's something that I've become much more comfortable with. Now looking back, I'm so glad that I did it because I didn't have anybody around taking snapshots on holidays of me indicates this very purposeful taking of portraits. It's given me an amazing record of my life over the last few years. I'm going to take you through a few of my favorite pictures. There's a few reasons really why I put yourself in my images. Sometimes it's adding a figure into a composition, which I know, it'll be a blunder photo without it. Sometimes it's to capture moments with my kids. For example, these two here, these are a couple of my favorites. This beach here was actually become a place that I've returned to over the last three years to try and take a family portrait with the dog included, and watching the kids and the dog got bigger has been, now, something which I'm really grateful for as I look back. There are other reasons, for example, this one which is it's just a filled with hay bales. So without being in the picture, it just isn't such an interesting composition. When I first started taking photos, I had my kids with me a lot because they weren't at school yet. They were the main reason why I love taking photos. If I saw a situation where I wanted people in the picture, I often had them to run around and I could save went down that path, and off they would go and I would have my shot. Whereas when they start a school, it became a lot more difficult. The opportunities to take pictures with them were fewer, and also when I started traveling on my own for work. For example, this photo in Dubai, I did actually have the kids with me on this trip, but I couldn't ask them to walked up a steep sand dune in the baking heat, so I set up my tripod. I felt that was something which I only got a couple of take some because it was really hard getting up that hill and I didn't want too many footprints in the sand. It was literally nine shots on my timer and [inaudible]. Without having me in the picture, it would just be a picture of a pile of sand which it doesn't work. Again, with these ones which at the flower fields, the setting is beautiful but it's just a flat field. So knowing that I am willing and able to walk into that shot even though my face isn't show, and it's not a personal moment. Particularly, it just really adds to that image into the field and evokes a feeling, I think that is, hopefully, more inviting. People can imagine themselves in that setting. This photo I took in Rwanda, which was a really important trip to me, it was a year ago. Even though I'm not looking at the camera, the photo, it invites the viewer to look at what I'm looking at. It captures that moment for me. That also invites the audience into that scene and they can look at what I'm looking at. This tree-lined path is a spot I've been taking photos in for a few years, initially with the kids. We used to watch the weather forecast and go out on autumnal mornings in the fog. These two, I took within a month to the day of each other. You can see how obviously the passing of time makes it really interesting comparison. Being in the photo, again, just to satisfy interests to the image. These two images especially show that you don't necessarily have to go far, you don't have to go to places of incredible natural beauty. You can find a spot in your local park and find hopefully, exceptional conditions, and that can take a bit of a knack to make sure you get out for the sunrise or on a frosty morning, or something which gives it a little bit of magic, but you don't have to get on a plane and go a long way. Social media is filled with glamorous people going to glamorous places. I'm neither of those things, and don't often go to glamorous places. You can chronically [inaudible] , it can be small or it can be local, it doesn't have to be big and impressive. 3. Working in Manual Mode: For me, having complete control over my camera and knowing exactly what it's going to do is really important. Essentially avoids frustrations. Like when I was learning to shoot, I'd go out and my camera was doing things automatically, which was leading to me coming back and being really frustrated, not knowing why I wasn't getting what I was hoping to get. Learning to use my camera manually just avoids those frustrations because you are always going to get exactly what you are intending to get. This is the camera that I use most of the time. It's an Nikon D850. It's full-frame DSLR, which I absolutely love. The lens I have on here at the moment is 24, 70, 2.8 and I actually prefer shooting with prime lenses, but this is a really, really useful lens for traveling. For example, when I went to Slovenia, I was shooting some mountains and you can't get any closer, obviously to those objects. Having a zoom lens is really helpful for when you can't actually move your feet. But I personally find my 50 mm, 35 mm unrivaled for how sharp they are. But yeah, this is a really, really useful lens. There's three settings which you are going to decide, your ISO, your F-stop which is your aperture, and your shutter speed. Basically the three elements of exposure need to be balanced. As you adjust one, you'll have to check on the others to compensate that your spatial is still correct. Understanding exposure fully is a really in-depth thing which could be a whole course on its own. But I'm going to take you through the basic elements of it and the things to really look out for. The ISO is basically how much light is coming into your camera and hitting the sensor, the lower your ISO the better quality your image is going to be. If we're shooting outside on a bright sunny day, then your ISO is going to be 100. Whereas if you shooting indoors, then you might have to bump that up to compensate. If you keep your ISO very low, then your shutter speed might fall too low, and therefore you might get some blur. The F-stop is basically the depth of field, which is exactly how much of the field in front of you is going to be in focus. At very shallow depth of field would be a low F-stop and this lens, for example, this is a 24-72.8. 2.8 is the lowest F-stop that this lens will go. I have other prime lenses which go as low as 1.4 and that's an incredibly shallow depth of field. For example, if you're shooting somebody's face, you may get the tip of their nose in focus, but not the eye. If you're shooting with a shallow depth of field, that's something that you have to be really careful about, that you might not get exactly the right thing in focus. You don't want your camera to be making a decision for you as to what it's focusing on. Make sure you choose a single focus point on your camera so that you can make sure that the camera is actually focusing on the eye of the subject in front of you and not for example their shoulder or their hair or their nose. When you're shooting yourself with a timer, it's obviously very difficult to be incredibly precise. To just ensure that I'm going to get myself in focus, I actually increase the depth of field a bit and shoot with a higher F-stop. The final element of shooting in manual mode is the shutter speed. Again, this is something which is quite important to understand, I think because if your shutter speed drops too low, you're going to get blurry fingers. Children especially move very quickly and sometimes if people are shooting in aperture priority then the shutter speed can drop too low if the sun goes behind the cloud, for example and a child moves their hand to their face and their fingers would be blurry and it can ruin a really lovely moment. It's something to just be aware of and the more you shoot in manual mode, the more second nature becomes. A good rule of thumb with shutter speed is to avoid camera shake. Always have your shutter speed about twice the length of your lens. If you're shooting with a 50 mm lens is a good rule of thumb to have a minimum for handheld photography of one over a 100. For a person walking towards you for example, one over 400 is a good shutter speed. If someone is running, then you might want to go something like one over 800. When you shooting people in general, the parts of manual mode that I would prioritize are the shutter speed because having blurry people in photos can be so frustrating and you miss that moment and the F-stops specifically when you're shooting yourself because you need to overcompensate a little bit and increase your depth of field just to make sure that you are getting all of yourself in-focus. I would prioritize those in this situation over the ISO. I'll bump the ISO a little bit higher. You're not going to lose much quality in your image, and it's really easy to get rid of any grain in post-production. To me, it's more important to make sure that your picture is sharp and in focus because that's something that you can't really fix if you miss that moment. My preferred way of taking photos of myself is with a timer, all cameras have it. If you just go to the settings, you can Google it or whatever, look up on your manual, but you'll be able to find how to set a timer. I set my camera to always take nine shots, which is the maximum it will take without pressing the shutter again. I adjust the interval and the delay depending on the situation I'm in and how long I think I'll need to move between each shot. Personally shooting in manual mode for me just eliminated the frustrations that I was finding, I suppose I'm a bit of a control freak and I want to have absolute control over what my camera is doing and there was certain things I was finding, for example, finding my child's shoulder in focus and not their face, which I would just come home and Google like mad and try and work out what was going wrong and everything in the end came down to me making the decisions rather than my camera throwing out multiple focus points and deciding what it thought I wanted to have in focus. It was just about having control. Now we're going to go out and actually shoot some self-portraits. 4. Photographing Yourself: So we've been walking through Prospect Park and looking for a place to shoot, and we have found this house which is amazing. Obviously, I love the white and the texture on the paint, and the minty green shutters are perfect for my feed. The sun has been really bright all day today, which actually makes this beautiful, but it makes it really hard to shoot in, and the light is really strong which creates really strong contrasts and deep shadows. At the moment, as the sun is starting to set over here, the light is much softer and more directional. So it's going to shine at a more flattering angle onto a figure which is great for portraits. The shadows that are falling on the wall at the moment look beautiful. But I need to take a few test shots because sometimes it doesn't look quite right in camera, I know it's a bit too busy. I might decide to simplify it and go for an area that's in full shadow or that's in full sun. I'm going to try some things and see what works. The very first time I went out and took photos of myself, I didn't have any equipment on me other than my camera. I use the self timer because it's there, it's on every camera and anyone can do it. You don't have to have any special equipment, using the timer gives you a certain freedom. You're not actually thinking about the exact moment when the shutter will click. So you can walk off and twirl around, try some different things, lose your inhibitions a little bit, which worked really well for me because I was really self-conscious in front of the camera. If there'd been another person there shooting me, I would have felt very stiff and nervous. So it being just me, my camera, and the timer is how I got used to taking photos of myself. The best way to get yourself in focus is figure out exactly where you want yourself to be in the composition and focus on that spot somehow. Sometimes I will leave something in that position in the photo, like a camera bag, or the flowers, or my hat, and I'll focus the camera on that point and then walk to it before the timer starts. In this situation to begin with, I focused on the back wall of the house because I tried standing there, and then I moved the focus forward and focused on the pillar and realized I preferred that composition so I was going to stand next to the pillar. That's where I focused the camera. With self-portraits and shooting yourself, it's a bit of a safety net to increase the depth of field a bit. I've actually set my camera to F7 just to make sure that more of this shot is in focus and that ensures that I'm not going to be slightly forwards or backwards. If I was using say, F2.8, then the pillar would be in focus, but not much in front of it and not much behind it would. If I happen to be behind the pillar with my arm around it, I might be slightly out of focus. So just as a safety net in this situation, I would increase the F-stop. Yeah, with the poses, it can be trial and error. Sometimes I will realize that it looks better in the composition to be sitting. It can depend on the angle of the photo as well. If you're coming at it from a low angle, you can look weird if you're standing up. Sometimes then to sit down and make yourself more compact in the picture just works better, and it really depends how much space you've got around you so it's a bit of trial and error. If I've got the time to take lots of shots, then I will take as many as I can until I feel really sure that I've got something. It's really frustrating getting home and realizing that you've got your eyes closed or that you're a fraction out of focus. So if you've got time to do it, it's worth setting it and then really zooming in on each picture, making sure that actually your face looks okay, that you are in focus, and that you are going to be happy when you get home and look at it on a bigger screen. Sometimes I'm in a situation where I might only get two takes and then I'm done if there's a lot of people around or the light is changing quickly. But it's nice to try different things and come back and look at the back of your screen, and think actually my leg looks weird there or that's not flattering, I'm going to move my arms, I'm going to try looking up, looking away and messing about with a few different things, and you see and learn what works for you and what you're happy with. Now we're going to go back and have a look at these photos on the computer and fingers crossed it is something great. 5. Choosing a Hero Shot: We've just got back from the park and we're going to have a look at the photos that we got. The thing is, of course, is something really good. I would just take my memory card out of my camera and literally put it into my computer with the card reader, and then upload the photos to Lightroom. I always shoot in RAW. I find the picture quality much better and it gives me a lot more play when I'm editing. So that means that I need to process those photos through software such as Lightroom and can't do it straight onto my phone. We can see here the practice shots that I took, just working out exactly where I wanted to take the photo. The shadows on the wall here were really nice and I actually chose in the end to use this shutter because I particularly liked the extra character on this piece of wall around it. Actually, at the time I thought the shadow here was too deep and I would crop the image here. But looking at it on my computer, I actually quite like this texture in the ceiling of the veranda and the roof part. So we'll see how that edits. The shadow might lift out nicely and that might look quite cool. This is the place where I decided to set up my camera and take my self-portrait. Here we come into the ones there's me in. My first thought was to stand back against this wall and so when I was setting the camera, I focused on the wall and because there was so much light in the scene, we had really, really good natural light. I went actually for an F7, which is overkill, but it meant that I knew I was going to be all in focus. If you've got the opportunity to overdo it on your settings, then it means that you're not going to be disappointed. What I have actually then realized after having taken a few shots in this position, was the shadow behind me are not flattering, it's almost like there's two of me. After a couple of takes in this position, I actually decided I was going to move forward and stand by this pillar. I refocused the camera on the pillar here. This is perfectly in focus. You can see in this shot here the sun just dropped a little bit more and it's gotten a little bit underexposed. I've actually selected a few images which I really liked. Ones where the composition is good and I haven't got my eyes shut, which I do in quite a lot of them. It's quite difficult to tell on the back of the camera. But when you get them on the screen, quite often is pulling a bit of a silly face. I like this picture. I think I look okay, but I could possibly look a bit more cheerful. So just thinking about what I want this photo to do and I want to look friendly and engaging and hopefully happy with the situation. But all of these I'm quite happy with. I think I would definitely use any of these. This is a nice one, maybe not. After I'd tried standing up, I thought I'm going to try some sitting down simply because I think sometimes sitting can balance out the composition quite nicely. You've got the green shutter here and then I would occupy this space here. But obviously then figuring out your body position and not looking too awkward is difficult. These are actually the last few that I took. This was the last take when I just planted the flowers down next to me and I actually quite like these. I think these are my favorite. They are just a bit more relaxed and after a few, I finally smile and I think that's probably the one I would use. I think the composition works really well. The fact that I balance out this corner and this corner is taken up with the shutter and you've got all this interest with the shadow play and these quite strong lines and then the figure in the foreground is just a softer element compared to all these strong lines and shadows. I look quite relaxed here, and it looks quite natural to me. So that's the one I think that I would go for. These are the photos that I took because we went on the back of the house and I actually really like these. We don't have this same magical golden light, but the door is absolutely beautiful and the way the reflections in the glass frame, the figure on the steps, it's just is really nice. It actually matches my t-shirt really well, which was lucky. I probably have actually ended up with two pictures that I would use. The standing up one, again, just doesn't work as well for me. I think I look more relaxed and easygoing when I'm sitting down and actually thinking about cropping for Instagram to a four by five. The one where I'm actually sitting on the doorstep might work better than when I'm sitting on these steps here, because I'm going to lose part of the frame at some point, either the top or the bottom. I couldn't pull back anymore because there was other things going on here which didn't look as good. I think there's the edge of a pillar there. I probably don't want to lose this detail here. So I might go for one of these ones where I'm sitting on the doorstep so that I can keep the whole of this frame and actually crop out these steps here. For Instagram, I always crop to a four by five portrait. I think there was some evidence to show that it gets better engagement, but it's simply more pleasing as most people are viewing it on a mobile phone screen. It takes up more space of the screen. Your photo is almost a full-screen photo, whereas if you're posting a landscape photo, it is very small on the person's screen and they'll probably see a bit of someone else photo below it. It's definitely less engaging. I always used to think square as I was taking photos because that was the format that was used on Instagram and now we can post portrait photos. I'm thinking four by five, which isn't a full-frame. So you know that you're always going to lose a little bit the top or a little bit the bottom of frame. So yeah, I have that ratio in my mind as I'm framing a shot and I know which bit of the image I'm prepared to lose. I just want to convey a realistic side of myself. I don't want to appear to be somebody who I'm not. So I go for photos, I choose ones which I feel they are me. I don't look how I don't actually look in real life. I'm not overacting. Every photo has an element of staging by nature. I think that's something which we have to accept about any photo at all. There's always an element of intention there. But hopefully, even though you've set up your tripod and gone to take a photo at a very specific time, you are hopefully just capturing a mood and a moment which has actually happened and is very true to what is happening at that time. Now we're going to take the two that I like the best and I'm going to show you how I added them for my Instagram. 6. Editing Your First Shot: Basically, my ethos with editing is to enhance a photo, but I try as much as I can to get it right in the camera. I find that if I've got a photo and I've exposed it correctly, and I've got good natural light, then generally, my editing is quite minimal. I tend to always go through a fairly similar process with each image, but I don't actually use preset, so I edit each image one by one. I have put a flag on the images that I like best. I'm just going to go to the flagged image now and start editing. The first thing I always do actually is to apply a profile correction. This Lightroom will read what lens you used and will apply standard corrections. For example, my 24-70 adds a little bit of vignetting in the corners. This profile correction, you can just see the slight difference it makes there to the picture. Then the next thing I would do is crop, just to know exactly that I've got the composition I want and that I'm working with the parts of the picture that I'm going to keep. I'm going to go to four by five. I'm just going to crop in a little bit. I might actually lose this post here on the right-hand side just come into about there, click "Done". I like that. You've got a nice vertical and horizontal lines here. The figure balance is out the shutters nicely. I'm a real stickler for perspectives as well. I think it's really important to try and get their perspectives as bang on as she can. It can be really distracting to the eye if you've got the lines on the door frame aren't quite straight. Light window's a really good job with automatically correcting them. The next thing I'm going to do is hit "Auto" now. It doesn't always work, and she think I wasn't great. I'm just going to apply a few corrections myself. You can actually see the poet. She isn't completely straight and that's fine. It's really our building, but we want to try and get things as straight as we can. The rotate in this little module here is really sensitive and is much better to use than in the crop. Using these lines to guide me, I'm just checking specifically this one here and this one here. I'm getting those as straight as I can. I think perhaps also, I'm going to adjust the vertical slightly and just pull the top of the image towards me, just to make sure that the lines, again, on the pillar and on the shutters are as straight as we can get them. That looks pretty good. This to me is rarely, rarely worthwhile. Spending a little bit of time fiddling with, just makes a huge difference to how visually pleasing your images are. It's amazing how the eye can pick up just something that's just a few millimeters out. Just looking at that shadow along the top as well. I'm going to adjust that tiny amount. I think that's good. I'm moving back up to this module hair. I'm going to just brighten up the photo a little bit. I don't want to go to much of the exposure. I don't like everything to be overexposed. I actually have my Lightroom set purposefully so that the back screen here is white. You can actually change that. It's down to preference. Some people have a light gray because that doesn't influence what they're doing. Some people have it black. I like to have it white so that it gives me a true white to measure up. I think one way to really make sure that your images always look like your images is by looking your white balance, and have just noticed that through this profile corrections, I need to crop in a tiny bit more that to get the corner. I've increased the exposure a little bit, I'm going to reduce the highlights just to make sure that they are not too bright. I'm going to pull out the shadows a little bit but I don't want everything to look two dimensional, so everything is quite gentle adjustments. I'm going to add a little bit more clarity to the image. But again, I don't want to go too far with that because it's going to be too strong with having a person in. Another really useful thing that you can do with editing, and the way that you can really get a little bit creative and make your images look like yours is playing with the color channels. Now she is going to saturate the shutters a little bit more, and this is really handy because I can target that part of the picture. Whereas if I increase the saturation on the whole picture, it would look quite different. I'm just going to brighten it up a little bit as well, increasing the luminance. It could actually probably do something with my t-shirt as well. It's quite nice just to increase the luminance on the oranges and just makes my shirt pop out a bit more. Actually, because we've got this lovely golden light, I'm going to add in a little bit warmth into the shadows. If I move this slider to somewhere between the oranges and the yellows, and then just add in a tiny bit of warms there, and then just clean up these whites a little bit here. I'm just going to desaturate the yellow to try and give a truer white to the overall image. There's rarely useful thing with Lightroom is that you can just separate parts of the image. This is definitely something that I use a lot of. Another way I could approach the shutter, for example, and really making that pop is if I just click on "Show Selected Mask Overlay" you are about to see where I paint. Making sure the auto mask is selected. This is really clever at picking up exactly the part of the picture that I want to deal with. Without going over the lines, I don't have to be too careful at all. I'm just going to unclick that one. Let's just increase the saturation and the clarity. I can add in more texture. Because I wouldn't want to do that to the whole picture because it would start to make me look weird. But to increase the texture on those shutters and increase the color that actually looks really good. I could also treat all of this background here just to brighten it all a bit. Or I could brush a mask overlay onto myself and just brighten up the rest of the picture, but make sure that I don't get overexposed. That is about it. If I click here, you can see the before and after of the picture. Not that one. 7. Editing Your Second Shot: I'm going to move on to the other photo. Again, I'm going to go through a similar process with applying the profile corrections. You can just see, most lenses, especially wide-angle ones, will make the image a little bit convex. Then I'm actually going to apply the perspective correction now and just see what it does, so hit Auto. Well, that was pretty good. This line here is nice and straight. The uprights looks straight. I'm going to crop it to four by five, and I'm going to move that up to the top, so that I get all of that lovely door frame in the shop. I just want these widths, so the sides need to be equal as well. That's maybe a little bit strapped in at the bottom. I guess I could have some of that step in, actually. That looks quite nice because of that texture, although it's not completely straight. Let's just go back to the perspective corrections. I'm just going to move it on the horizontal fraction, trying to just pull that right-hand side towards me. I think that looks good, so nice and straight. I'm going to click Done. I'm just going to go back up to the exposure, increase the exposure a little bit. That looks a bit better. I'm going to actually add a little bit of contrast as well. I always go gently with the contrast, but it obviously increases the difference between the lights and the darks. So with this picture being predominantly white, it's going to make those pop a bit more and just increase the whites again. I'm measuring it against my screen here. Obviously, it's an old building, so I don't want it to look brand spanking new and pearly white. I want to keep this texture, but I don't want it to look yellowed and minging. I'm just going to decrease the highlights a little bit. By decreasing the highlights, you can actually, usually, increase the exposure a bit again. It's just playing with ways of getting the picture to look as bright as you want it to look, without having any detail or looking completely overexposed. Usually by reducing the highlights, it'll give you a bit more play in the exposure. I'm going to add a little bit of clarity, because I look a little bit two-dimensional. That's better. That's going to give me a bit more play with the exposure again. I really like these reflections in the doors, they look great and that wasn't actually something I spotted whilst taking this shop. But you can always tell that the sun was setting and that it was a beautiful day, so that's an added dimension which is really nice. I'm going to add a little bit of texture as well. I'm actually going to brush on a mask overlay on this top section of the photo. I'm just going to make this brush, if you can see there, bigger. The edge around it is the feather here, which you can increase or decrease, depending on what you're brushing on. For this situation, I want the feather to be quite big, because this is going to be a nice, soft edge. I'm just going to brush it onto this top a bit, just so that that is not so much noticeably darker than the rest of the image and click. That's brightened up, but you can see it's quite yellow. I think perhaps if I desaturate, that's going to make it look a bit cleaner, and some of these have automatically. I'm not sure where this auto setting came from. That looks much better. I use a brush mask for basically any image where I want to treat one part of the picture separately to the rest. It's really useful when you've got a figure in your picture. I quite often work on parts of myself, like you can just focus on [inaudible] just show you. Sorry about the close-up. Let me decrease that, just go over the hair a bit and you can just add a few highlights or you can just make a figure pop a little bit more out of the scene by adding in a bit more saturation or making it a little bit brighter. I think the absolute best thing about Lightroom is this mask overlay, and the fact that you can treat different parts of the image separately, and that's definitely is a really powerful part of the editing tool. I would probably always edit two or three to a finished standard and then move this onto my phone, have a look at how they are actually measuring up against my Instagram gallery. Then the final decision process comes at that point when I maybe sit with it for a day or two on my phone, before I really decide which one I like the best or which one is working for me. I'll show you the before and after. There we go. I haven't changed anything dramatically. I'm looking for a good white balance and a picture that is nice and bright, but still retains all the details and all the important parts of the picture. I'm really pleased with that. Finish editing your pictures and next up, we'll talk about sharing them to social media. 8. Finalizing and Sharing: I finished editing this picture and we're ready to think about posting it now. I export photos from Lightroom at 600 pixels per inch and I actually use Dropbox and I export pictures into Dropbox and then download them there onto my phone. You can also e-mail them or drop them to yourself. I find that a useful way to do it and then I've got them stored there as well. If I right-click on the image and go to Export, I actually have a shortcut setup to Instagram, and that exports the high resolution image straight into my Dropbox folder. But if I go into the Export module, I'll show you quickly the settings that I use. I export them to JPEG, quality 100 percent, and resolution 600 pixels per inch, sharpen for screen just standard amount, and hit Export. I think at some point Googled what's the best resolution, because if you're exporting for Facebook or for web use, like web use is 72 pixels per inch. Sometimes I'll export 800 pixels per inch, but that makes the files massive and even stock photo websites will reject them for being over 30 megabytes. So 600 pixels per inch seems to work well for my camera. It's a size where the file doesn't overwhelm everything completely, but it's a good resolution. Now the photos are on my camera roll, it's good to look at them again through your phone screens. Sometimes this screen, the tone can be slightly different and it's good to measure it against the rest of you Instagram gallery and check that you have got that white balance how you want it to look, and that basically it suits your style and that it's working with the rest of your edits. I actually use an app for this called Unum. This is where my Instagram gallery is to at the moment, these are images I've already posted. You can tap on grid shift, it'll show. That's how my Instagram currently looks. You can actually then upload images from the camera roll and see how they're going to look. These are where the images that I have waiting to post. I can drag these around and make sure they look nice together and work well. You can see the whites look nice and everything is sitting well together. So yeah, that's how I formulate my gallery as a whole. I like to look at it as a body of work and something that ties in together. Something to be viewed as a whole entity rather than stand-alone images which have nothing to do with each other. This is a really handy tool to just check that your work hangs together as a body of work. When people look at your gallery, they tend to see that top nine or 12 images and that's probably where they make a snap decision on whether to follow you or not. I think having a selection of work that hangs together really well and forms a nice gallery that works well together, I think that can only be a good thing and hopefully will encourage people to follow along. One other thing that's useful about this app is that you can actually hide images if you decide that maybe you do want to post that one next but it's not working with something that's a little bit further down. You can actually hide ones that you think you're maybe not going to keep. So yeah, I'm really happy with those. I think they're going to work well. I might actually play with the edits a little bit more. I'm going to stick with it for a day or two, maybe post something else for now and yeah, just keep working on those a little bit. But I can see that the colors are going to work really well. They're going to, I think, look good in my gallery. With captions, it's important to not think about it too much and just be natural, just say what you think can be chatty, be friendly. But I know some people get really stuck with captions and don't post for days and days because they can't think of something incredible to say. Sometimes I think photography speaks for itself and you don't actually need to say anything too groundbreaking. You can just tell a little story about where you took the photo, why you took the photo, or say something about your day just as if you're talking to your friends really, and don't worry about it too much. Just spin up strong. 9. Final Thoughts: Congratulations and thank you so much for joining me in this class. I can't wait to see you back. Please share it to the project gallery and I'm looking forward to seeing it. Thank you so much. Bye.