Fake

"Fast beautiful photo sharing"

 INSTAGRAM

The following is taken from their website:

It’s a fast, beautiful and fun way to share your photos with friends and family.

Snap a picture, choose a filter to transform its look and feel, then post to Instagram. Share to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr too – it's as easy as pie. It's photo sharing, reinvented.

Oh yeah, did we mention it’s free?

  

If you have a Twitter or a Facebook account you may have noticed how people have uploaded pictures that look...different. When I first saw people post these pictures, I was quite taken aback, how could they have put so much effort into creating this picture in such little time? What could have just been an ordinary picture with a friend had become engrossed into a myriad of colors. The pictures also had a vintage feel to it, in a way it was capturing a brief moment and making it seem 'vintage' so that it would be something that one would look back on in the future.  I was quite taken aback, but I still didn't realize that this was done in a matter of clicks on a smartphone. After a while, this 'instagram' fad had caught on with a lot of people. I was bewildered yet again as more people seem to have comprehended what I had thought was advanced Photoshopping skills and posting to this 'Instagram' website.  And just for a little while (like a week), it seem to be the cool thing to do, or so I thought. After I got my first, brand-new smartphone, I was so excited to cram it full of apps that I would only use once in my lifetime. I finally figured out what Instagram was, and without haste I downloaded this app from Google Play. All you had to do was take a picture, put a certain filter across it, and ta-DA! all finished! At first I was eager to take snapshots of everything that came across my sight, from family and friends to even my headphones and a water bottle. 

After a while, I grew tired of Instagram, I began to see for what it really was. I decided to stop using using Instagram, not because it was a bad application, but just because it seemed to become fake to me. These filters that are supposed to improve your photos are a way of hiding the imperfections of a photo. While it didn't change the content of the photo, it changed the way that people perceive it. Besides the 'vintage' thing wore off for me after a while. In the age where people want things as fast as possible, 'vintage' things don't really fit in as people back in the day used to take their time with things. I have a few photos of myself and even my parents when they were young, those pictures were actually vintage. Not because they were edited and smothered with filters, but because they were taken at the so-called 'retro age'.  Instagram also dumbs down advanced photographers' skills, editing certain photos can take much longer than a matter of clicks. No, you're not even remotely close to a photographer just because there's an app for that. People who take photos with Instagram now take photos of other ridiculous things, not just a cherished moment, but anything that comes to mind, and with the technology, they attempt to make it look retro or vintage, as if it was something that deserved to last forever. The reality is that Instagram will go down in history as just another fad that people use to try and cherish every single thing they do in life as a memory. 

You don't need Instagram to make your photos look like a happy, vintage, moment in your life, because they already are and they always will be. When you grow older in life, those snapshots will automatically look vintage. There's no app that could ever replace that feeling. Take it from someone who's been down that road before.


Thanks for reading,