Before deleting my account, I downloaded all my posts and reels from Instagram. While all these photos still exist on my phone (and I guess Apple’s cloud) it’s nice to have them in one place without having to search through all the random snaps — it’s just the best of the best, you know? For all its flaws, Meta makes this process pretty easy, and delivers a neatly organized archive that is easy to peruse.

Looking at these photos on my computer is an entirely different experience than looking at them on my phone. Seeing them full-sized instead of phone-sized makes me fall in love with them all over again and remember why I wanted to take, edit and share them in the first place. I remember, too, how much I enjoy creating photos that express my own creative vision, something I’ve low-key missed since I took a break stopped using Instagram last spring.

This is a good reminder that I don’t need social media as an excuse to make art; I can keep doing it just because I love it. As Austin Kleon always says, Show Your Work! That doesn’t have to mean it has to be on some corporate platform where my art makes money for other people. I don’t know if my photos are good or not; I don’t do it because I want to be a professional photographer; I don’t even really care if other people like my photos. But the act of sharing a creation where other people might see it gives me the motivation to take a little extra care in producing it, even if the only person I’m really making it for is me. 

To that end, I’m putting together some themed collections of my favorites here on my own website. I’m trying this cloud collection (an inadvertent answer to my last post’s title question) here in the blog, but I may decide to make it in it’s  own page in the Projects section. We’ll see how I feel about it! The collection will be displayed in random order, and includes photos from my earliest iPhone days, so the quality will vary a lot. The skies always did their job, though, even if the tech wasn’t up to the challenge.