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Why Instagram is Terrible for Photographers, and Why You Should Use It

Posted by:     Date: April 30, 2012  |  41 Comments

 

Although everyone has an opinion on Facebook’s purchase of Instagram for $1b, I think we can all agree: Instagram is terrible for photographers.

(gotcha)

Why? Let’s count the ways.

Why Instagram is Terrible for Photographers…

The rights grab

Let’s look at the Terms of Use:

…By displaying or publishing (“posting”) any Content on or through the Instagram Services, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content, including without limitation distributing part or all of the Site in any media formats through any media channels, except Content not shared publicly (“private”) will not be distributed outside the Instagram Services.

…You represent and warrant that: (i) you own the Content posted by you on or through the Instagram Services or otherwise have the right to grant the license set forth in this section, (ii) the posting and use of your Content on or through the Instagram Services does not violate the privacy rights, publicity rights, copyrights, contract rights, intellectual property rights or any other rights of any person, and (iii) the posting of your Content on the Site does not result in a breach of contract between you and a third party. You agree to pay for all royalties, fees, and any other monies owing any person by reason of Content you post on or through the Instagram Services.

Like many businesses on the web that deal with photo assets (from Facebook to Pinterest), the Terms of Use are encompassing, and grab rights from photographers as a condition of participation.

Brad Mangin recently wrote about using the iPhone and Instagram. He spends most of his time shooting peak baseball action with high end Canon DSLRs and 400mm f/2.8 lenses, so he sees Instagram as a cool way to show life around the ballpark and behind the scenes moments.

Photos by Brad Mangin

The problem with this wonderful dugout photo with the Gatorade coolers is that Instagram could, in theory, license that image to Gatorade without compensating Brad. Would they? Probably not, but more and more companies are finding utility in using Instagram to create user interaction and build their content-based marketing strategies, so it does fall within the realm of possibility.

This is the main reason Darren Carroll has resisted the urge to jump on the Instagram bandwagon, and prefers sticking with apps like Hipstamatic, which have friendlier terms.

The quality sucks

Director Nick Knight recently used Instagram to photograph model Cara Delevinge posing with a bunch of animals in a series that was “inspired by Internet memes, animal GIFs and Autumn/Winter 2012′s taste for grown-up, blown-up overdressing.” There is clearly a sense of parody here, so I think this was more of a way to generate publicity than to take beautiful photos. But the point is pretty clear, the quality leaves something to be desired in low light situations.

Photo by Nick Knight

Motion blur, poor dynamic range, pixelation, and the list goes on. The beautiful model wearing stylized clothing while holding cats is done a major injustice by taking an image with the quality you might get if you photographed an old television set.

Art filters

Tell me why the masses believe that applying an art filter to an image instantly makes it better? Oh look, it’s blue! It has a fake lens flare! Is that polaroid edge real?!!?!

It’s strange to me that we fall back on these anachronisms of the analog world. Kids don’t even know that these art filters were based on real analog phenomenon, and now they use them because they think it looks cool. Damn kids!

DC Stock Images photographer Randy Santos uses Instagram and DSLRs. There’s no comparison in my opinion.

Which Randy Santos image do you prefer? Instagram on the left, or DSLR on the right?

Instagram is a repository for cute animals

While you’re trying to build a serious body of work, Instagram is being dominated by people who take photos of their pets. And these people are simultaneously amassing huge followings. In the same way that our societal love of America’s Funniest Home Videos was supplanted by the viral video on YouTube, I feel like we’re being suckered by this most basal response to want to say “awwww.” Do we lack any power of discernment and taste?

…And All the Reasons You Should Be Using It

The rights grab is a theoretical threat

Brad Mangin has used many photo apps on his iPhone, but the Instagram hook for him was the social networking aspects. Not only does he build followers through the mobile-only Instagram network, but he also publishes images onto Facebook – thus, he reaches two distinct demographics. We’ve constantly preached the need to go where your customers are, and to also understand that different demographics hang out in different places. By building an audience through multiple social networks, Brad is teeing up the ability to 1) continue providing his legacy customers like Sports Illustrated and MLB with sports action, while 2) creating a consumer-based audience that might purchase a book or photo or attend a workshop with him.

Is the Gatorade threat real? Maybe. But using Instagram in an ad campaign is a visual gimmick in the same way that the heavy handed HDR might be used. It’s less likely that a pro photographer’s image would be misapporpriated for commercial purposes than user-generated/submitted content being used as part of a viral campaign.

The quality is good enough and only getting better

Sports Illustrated chose Greg Foster's Hipstamatic portrait over the images shot with a Canon DSLR for this feature spread.

Maybe art filters do make the world look better

Have you ever watched Steven Sodebergh’s Traffic? Depending on which storyline he’s telling, you get a different film tint. Lots of people have commented on Hollywood’s obsession with this banal color correction, and how it makes every movie look the same visually. But it’s kind of like getting a polaroid camera. There’s something about that look that is so compelling, and it never gets old when you’re the one doing it.

Don’t get me wrong. It is a shame that bad photography suddenly seems better. But we can’t stop our visceral reactions from happening. Why do you think Jersey Shore is so popular?

Karen Rosenberg had an insightful piece in the New York Times about the retro look that is enabled by apps like Instagram:

Why do we want to tweak our photos so conspicuously? Why do we suddenly want them to look as if they came from old analog cameras?…Nostalgia is certainly a factor; parents, for instance, may want their children’s photographs to look like the ones in old family albums…The photograph itself, even an artily manipulated one, has become so cheap and ubiquitous that it’s no longer of much value. But the experience of sharing it is, and that’s what Facebook is in the business of encouraging us to do.

Instagram is a repository for cute animals

This is still true. Don’t do this. Ok, do it.

Don’t hate the player

Photojournalist Teru Kuwayama doesn’t hate the player, nor the game. In a piece in The Telegraph, he said:

“You could make an analogy to the advent of the electric guitar or electronic music. Much to the annoyance of classical musicians, those things made ‘everyone’ a musician. I grew up on punk rock, hip hop and death metal, so I welcome the post-classical age of photography, and the explosion of amateur expression that comes with it.

“Obviously, it sucks to be a professional photographer, and it’s personally inconvenient to lose your pedestal and your livelihood to a $2 app, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing for photography.”

Photos are the glue and currency of social networks. They are fantastically “sticky” but as we’ve seen with Pinterest, the photos are great when they depict your product, not when they are your product — at least not in the traditional world of photography. But in the new world, this golden age of photography as I like to call it, photographers need to find how to leverage the distribution and “any one can do it” capabilities of the photo “app” to sustain and expand their business.

Alternately, you could invent Instagram. (By the way, you don’t need $400m to party in Vegas until 4am).


41 Comments

Laura {Babb Photo} 4-30-2012

Adapt or die. Instagram isn’t going anywhere so we might as well embrace it.

Imogen 4-30-2012

I am a photography student and my dissertation was about how companies are embracing Instagram to advertise. Yes the app is a threat to photography but only certain types of photography- as the fashion photo shows, you just can’t get the quality on a phone. Nature, event and fashion photography for example are unlikely to be affected because not only do they need a creative eye, but different kinds of technical knowledge to get quality images. As is pointed out here, people on instagram take pictures of their cute pets, or a bee on a flower or a sunset- these are not shots that make you a commercial ‘professional’ there is no purpose to them.

Renee 4-30-2012

Whos dere. Calm yourself. Instagrsm is so much less about photography, and much more about sharing what you’re doing in real time, with snapshots. I don’t follow people that do otherwise because that kinda defeats the purpose of the app for me. One thing I do like is that it does make people notice more. I have seems friends feeds improve as they begin to learn to see the world more photographically. Sure, some will never change… But eh! Instagram is not the end all be all of photography. It’s social networking with SNAPSHOTS, so cool your jets and let professionals do their thing, and college students upload pictures of their beer pong tables. I’m not sure why these things get professional’s panties in a bunch. I shoot professionally myself, and I’m not sweating apps like hipstamatic and Instagram.

sabina louise pierce 4-30-2012

Still on the fence about it as a pro i hate the whole right grab thing!

Jamie Lawrence 4-30-2012

Sorry, but I fail to see the rights-grab? The licence lists the rights that Instagram requires to operate the service. It doesn’t ask for the rights to resell or sub-licence the content (unless I’ve missed something).

AFAIK, Instagram did have a rights-grab problem but that was resolved over a year ago.

Also, you should remember that most people don’t associate Instagram photos with old photos. They’re just styles to them. They have no interest in emulating old photos, they’re just trying to convey a mood or aesthetic from a pre-defined list (much easier for the layman than the infinite choice a photographer can make)

Neil Buchan-Grant 4-30-2012

IG is a neat little app and I’ve seen some really nice work made with it, but if you stand back and see it in context, I think it’s easy to see that the style of image it is making popular today, will quickly lose its appeal. just like tobacco filtered skies and soft focus portraits had their day and were rightly abandoned, the same will happen with instagram’s adoption by pop culture. it’s a great social networking tool and it has brought photography to many people who may have otherwise never have bothered, but at the end of the day, it’s still a bit ‘gimicky’. it can turn a bland picture into something pretty enough to spend a little money on but, however much some might regard its value as an artform today, this style of image will be passé within a very short time and something else will be the new darling of the media world:)

Will Alan 4-30-2012

Yay for the death of professional photographers!

Imma git me somma dem art filters…

Eyal Gurevitch 5-1-2012

It makes Pro Photogs work harder.
That’s not a bad thing.

-eyalg

YRaj 5-1-2012

As an event photographer, I don’t see the threat.
We must adapt.. Build a following.. That’s what I will do.. It is another way to promote your business… Have fun with it.. It’s another plus… Imagine that something is so popular that is about sharing photos and it is free to join!! And it is about what we do best!!
This is a gift to professional photographers..

Ken W. 5-1-2012

This is pretty funny. I recently posted on FB asking the question, “when did out of focus, overexposed, desaturated and heavily vignetted images become the standard instead of the exception.” If it’s a bad photograph, regardless of the tool used to create it, let’s just label it as art and move on, lol.

I hope one day, real quality photography will once again become our standard so that when we do use artistic license on the occasional image, it can be regarded as real art, and not just an image labeled as art because it wasn’t shot as we intended to begin with.

disabled linking 5-1-2012

When did you remove these comments as links? Kind of selfish and rude don’t you think to disable the link to the person who took the time to comment?

Brett 5-1-2012

Instagram is just one more nail in the coffin of the photographic medium and a huge blow to the value of an honest photograph. I’m a very positive, upbeat person, and I see nothing but negatives in it. I feel no pressure to ever embrace it and am very happy about that.

Shilpi 5-2-2012

Actually, you picked the worst picture of the bunch from the Nick Knight fashion shoot. Check my blog to see the rest of the pictures.. which turned out fine!

Allen Murabayashi 5-2-2012

I picked it on purpose to show the motion blur, but yes, there were better quality images in the edit!

Brian Koppelman 5-2-2012

I want my 5 minutes back. You’re daft & boring. Shut up & go take some photos.

ACandela 5-4-2012

This has been such a touchy subject with me since I discovered IG a few years ago. I thought it was “cute and gimicky” at first use. But as IG’s users started to explore other elements of photography and incorporate IG into their (photographers/non-photographers) creative process that’s where I feel the look of photography was shifting further into a different direction.

I’ve been shooting for over 15 yrs. and have an art school background which allowed me to explore other ways of creating images. This was before IG, iPhones, apps, etc.. But what makes IG more of a “stickler” for some of us is the easy accessibility to such software. It affordably can make anyone be a “cool photographer”. Back in the day, it was all a chemical process, custom photo labs, etc.. now all of this is done through photo apps and software programs.

I’m 50/50 on the use of IG in the professional photo market. Quality is low when reproduced, image degradation when enlarged. But it can create some interesting images under various contexts.

Now with FB purchasing IG for a load of dollars, who knows what will become of of this.

Joey B 5-21-2012

I hardly see it as a threat. Like someone mentioned earlier, its just another way to connect with your audience via photos.

Nik 5-21-2012

I have to say, this was a pathetic attempt at taking jabs at Instagram. I’ve been using it since the app was first released in 2010, and I’m there now for the community (which was non-existant in the beginning).

1. The photos you posted are from hipstamatic, not instagram. There is a notable difference (instagram, for example, does not have color flash).

2. Quality is hit or miss, but I’ve had several of my ig pics chosen by Getty as well.

Why you would point out so many negatives only to finish off with saying we should join… blows my mind.

Allen Murabayashi 5-21-2012

Nik, It’s a method of writing to build a case one way, then make a resolution in the other direction. I love Instagram, and I annotated where it was Hipstamatic.

Yusuf 5-25-2012

oh.oh I”m so sorry think positive of Photographer

Paul Ashby 7-1-2012

Will Alan, do you think thete is no place for professional photographers today, in the past or tomorrow, just think of the industry and business that images from pro photographers supply.
What job do you do???.

Johnny Wan 9-18-2012

Photography . The art or process of producing images of objects on photosensitive surfaces.
It doesn’t matter who or how you take a photo, its just capturing light!
Good or bad, its up to the individual viewer who captures and interprets the light in their own eyes and decide if its any good or not!

Ian Fowell 2-3-2013

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder…and if the beholder finds an image beautiful, for whatever reason, then (for them, at least) it´s a worthy picture…and as for the amateur versus pro debate, a pro´s work is defined by the market: if there are buyers for it, then there´s money to be earned from it, whether it be the product of a humble iPhone or a blindingly expensive “pro” setup. Anyway, if you don´t like a picture, nobody is forcing you to look at it!

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