Todd Lappin's Instagram tips

Mark F and I really dig the photos that our pal Todd Lappin posts to Instagram under his telstarlogistics account. His shots always have a wonderful hyperreal quality that is just subtle enough not to push them into the realm of over-filtered kitsch. We asked Todd how he does it and he says:

I usually do a few simple processes to my photos, using the same apps over and over (because I'm lazy).

I process most of the images I post through Camera+. Its Clarity tool is wonderful, and I am addicted to it -- Clarity adds a strong dose of brightness and contrast, which helps things pop. Camera+ also has some filters which are handy (AND which don't require the use of those annoying image borders that Instagram usually adds).

Beyond that, I'm also addicted to the Tilt-shift tool in Instagram (accessed via the drop icon in the top navbar). I don't use it to generate tilt-shit effects per se, but more to create depth-of field between foreground and back.

That's it! Most of the time.

For the rest, I follow a lot of the tips I learned from DocPop while reporting this story for the New York Times (last year). Check out his list of Apps in the sidebar, as well as the awesome how-to multimedia the NYT built.

• [nomad411]

  Hummm  I’ll be following him too from now on.  I’m still amazed very day by what the beautiful images we can create with iPhones/Androids for photography.  I’m @nomad411 as seen on http://instagrid.me/nomad411 or http://eyeem.com/gerardgodin  

• [espylaub]

  You can (thankfully!) permanently turn those horrible borders off in Instagram off, just tap the square icon in the top left corner in the camera view.

• [Sean Lally]

  Here’s a tip, stop using instagram.  So overused.

  • [Charles Vestal]

    What’s wrong with being used?

  • [electronicnonsense]

    You can use instagram to share photos without throwing a bunch of filters & borders on them. It sounds like you may have never used it before, so you may not know that it is actually a social photo stream in it’s self, kind of like twitter/tumblr, but with photos as posts. You can follow people within the instagram and interact and comment within the service. It’s more than just a program to put filters on your otherwise boring photos. That’s why the guy is saying “these are a bunch of other programs that you can use to touch up your photos before you upload them to instagram”.

  • [DocPop]

     That’s like saying “Stop using Flickr”.

  • [Surly Driver]

    Three comments in? I expected sooner.

• [jere7my]

  FYI: I’ve just started using SnapSeed on my iPad, and I’ve been very impressed. It’s an Instagram-style program, but aimed more at amateur photographers than hipsters. (I may be being unfair to Instagram; I only used it a couple of times.) SnapSeed has some funky-hip filters, but it also saves photos at full resolution, gives fine-grained and intuitive control over contrast and white balance and saturation, works with RAW, and so on. It’s not Photoshop, but for the price it’s pretty amazing: it was free when I got it (though it may have gone up to its usual $5 since then).

  • [Surly Driver]

    Snapseed on iPhone and iPad is a great way to do on-the-fly image tweaks. I use it all the time to adjust brightness, saturation, and color balance, crop, and sometimes add sharpening.

• [teapot]

  Photoshop/Lightroom users laugh in the face of your mobile apps and square pictures.

  Edit: This guys pictures are cool though. It’s just the torrent of bad photography out these days drives me nuts. Geocities made everyone web designers, Blogs made everyone journalists… now everyone is an artist thanks to instashoop.

  Watching my mates all rush to beat each other at posting virtually identical pictures is a funny thing, but I hate that whatever we were doing is put on pause so they can show everyone on the tubes how awesome their life is.