Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
Source: BIZLife
By: Milica Trnavac, director, creative director and lecturer at Web Content Creator course
Instagram is a platform that changes from month to month and adjusts to the needs of its users.
Today we have Instagram Gallery, Instagram Stories, Instagram Live, Instagram Boomerang, Instagram Highlights, Instagram Polls, Instagram Archive and the latest innovation – IGTV.
Since its inception, Instagram has been a fun platform that has enabled us to communicate with creative people directly in creative language – visual storytelling. By opening the Instagram account, a brand, whether large or small, gives voice to itself and is placed on a map of potential users.
To have a successful Instagram page for your brand or business, you need:
- To understand your audience
- Create content that your audience wants to see
- Entertain your followers
- Post not because you think you have to, but because you have something to say, share or ask
- Set the balance between promotional and inspirational – creative content
- Tell stories through visual content
- Build anticipation and offer exclusivity to your followers
- Analise your success – the audience, their habits, preferences, and based on insights build your content
There are more than one things that make a successful Instagram page, but one of the most important is creating good photos and visual content in general, as it is still the basic idea of Instagram – visual communication.
Do you think big brands engage agencies that then employ professional Instagram photographers and voila, they get wonderful photos? In reality, a good photo is not enough. It is necessary to first create a brand strategy based on which to tell the brand story which we wish to share on Instagram. Although Instagram is based on single photos, one should not forget the complete visual experience of an Instagram page.
Three photos in one are fine if they are part of a story and need to be utilized to their maximum, but all the images make the visual story of a brand. Creating good Instagram photos with your phone is actually more difficult than it looks! The first step many people forget about is tweaking their phone settings.
Before you can start thinking about composition, lighting and scenery, there are two things you should know about how to work with your phone camera to make a good Instagram photo.
Have you ever taken a photo of the sky and later realized that half of it is too blown out? Smartphones tend to naturally overexpose parts of your photo, resulting in overly pronounced portions of the image.
Of course there is a trick to fix this. It is better to get a bit of an underexposed photo that you can lighten later in editing, rather than ruining it with overexposure.
To reduce the exposure of your photo on your smartphone, tap and hold the brightest area to lock in focus and exposure. When you do this, you can move the camera to compose the desired photo. This is perfect for taking pictures in the sun.
Keep HDR off
HDR (High Dynamic Range) is hard to get right and can make a photo look unnatural. In essence, the function takes many different exposures of the same photo and merges them into one photo so you have a lot of detail.
Good Instagram photo needs to be clean, even when it has a lot of detail they have to have some kind of order, pattern, or shape.
Symmetry and geometry are highly represented in Instagram photo trends, and the background on each photo adds to tone and emotion. For a long time, flat monochrome backgrounds were the main trend, particularly white. Over the past year, we have seen photos with backgrounds of most diverse textures – fur, leather, wallpaper, marble, wood ….
Ultimately, perhaps the most important thing in creating a good Instagram photo is light. Light is the secret spice that can make any motif, captured with any phone, into a good photo and transmit the emotion. The best is natural light, so try to plan your posts in advance and organize a photo session with as much natural light as possible. In planning, keep in mind that in the morning the light is soft cold and pastel, in the afternoon it has very high contrast and gives strong shadows, and the most beautiful light is before and during the sunset when everything gets a natural warm-coloured filter with necessary soft overlays.
These are just some of the basics that will be discussed during the Web Content Creator course. The goal of this lecture is to go through all the steps that will enable participants to maximally use the potentials and possibilities offered by their phones, and Instagram.