I created an Instagram account on July 6, 2015, nearly a year and a half ago. As I looked back to the photos I posted then, I thought about what inspired me to create the account and start taking photos. I still don't know. I vaguely remember talking to my older brother and asking him how I should be taking photos. We were sitting in Dunkin Donuts and he told me to take a photo of my iced coffee. I was like “what are you talking about? Nobody cares what my iced coffee looks like”. After that day, it sort of became a competition of who could get the most likes on pictures. He doesn't know about that competition to this day but, between you and I, I won. I will say, however, that the one flaw most of my photographs had when I started out was that I used more filters than needed. I thought the water had to be chlorine-just-spilled-everywhere blue, when in reality, I just didn't have any knowledge of exposure, aperture, and all other aspects of photography. I rarely use filters on my photographs because I am more knowledgable of the features built into a camera that can help me capture what the human eye is seeing.

Anyways, I continued posting photos mostly of landscapes and nature since they were my favorite. But my Insta was mostly a summer thing because I would travel further and go more places than during the school year. The next summer, summer of 2016, I started posting again and my photos slowly got better and better. I love the idea of perspective and using angles that you wouldn't normally see. It’s very easy to take a nice photograph of a unique object or pretty scenary, but it is also very easy for that photo to look like stock photography. For me, I always choose a unique angle and capture the moment the way the human eye wouldn't normally view it. That’s not to say stop shooting from a normal angle all together, but a variety of shots will make your work more dynamic.

The two photos attached to this article post are the first and last photos I have posted on Instagram. The one on the left is a super saturated depiction of the waterfront in Newburyport, MA and the one on the right is a photograph of the sun setting at The Stevens-Coolidge Estate in Andover, MA. What my website's intentions are will be part 2 of this article...coming soon!