Friday, September 4, 2015

Instagram finally embraces the Landscape and Portrait mode


Wide open vistas, the flowing streams or even the open road, all of which needs the full breath of a landscape picture to transmit some semblance of space is finally possible on Instagram.

That's right folks, as of now, you can post landscape of portrait mode pictures by just doing the following.

Choose your picture by clicking either camera or gallery, and then hit the scale too on the lower left of the frame seen in the picture below and....you have full landscape or portrait mode pictures to post to Instagram.



Why Now? 


I think for the most part, it has to do with value. Now that Instagram is going to be advertising supported model, it would need to appeal to advertisers and by giving them more real estate to play with (within the picture frame) you have a much better chance or securing eyeballs. 

The square format, which was adopted from the old Polaroid SX-70 film camera, was good during the introduction. Since then, people have been clamoring for a larger frame and it's been done before if you had one of the those cropping tool apps that would put a landscape or portrait photo into a square frame. 

The same can be done for video as well during the dark ages of Instagram but all that is water under the bridge as landscape video too can be added for good measure. 

I have for the longest time avoided posting truncated photos, cropped just to fit Instagram because it wasn't natural, and to crop it using a third party app just to fir the square frame is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. 

Shooting naturally on Instagram isn't so Natural anymore


This was bound to happen. For the longest time, when you had a square frame to fit a picture, you could just hold your iPhone or Android device in portrait mode and you'd get the job done quickly and efficiently. 

Now with the landscape and portrait mode frames, you will have to capture a picture by putting your device in a horizontal (landscape) position. That will suck for some of you but only if you want your images to be in landscape mode. Instagram still allows you to post in square format by default. 

The other thing is that Instagram doesn't store high resolution images, and the old format was 640 pixels across. This was increased recently to 1080 pixels across and that also happens the the pixel count for landscape photos. 

For photographers, the picture will be seen as is.

There is no pinch to zoom for landscape or portrait pictures. So your picture better hold itself well under those conditions. 

Don't include those tiny details that can be seen as this will impact your picture as a whole. Besides this, just fire away and enjoy the new picture modes. 


 




 


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