Quitting Instagram as a photography amateur: social media alternatives

My name is Caya, and I consider myself a photography amateur. For years I've been working to build my Instagram profile, but I'm throwing the towel. I no longer believe Instagram is the social media platform for an amateur photographer to be discovered, so I am going to quit Instagram.

Some channels I mentioned:

To the Wonder:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0OxNL2B0zjZrxJXdobvldw

Draw like a Kid:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsfvBVUzDrVOdAd3MIuIq4Q
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Hello Youtube. My name is Caya and I consider myself and amateur photographer...and for the past few years I've been spending time and effort, crafting and publishing my photos on Instagram. But I no longer believe Instagram is the place to be discovered. I'm quitting Instagram, and I'm going to tell you why.

OK, so first of all, let's talk about the evolution of Instagram, and travel back to 2012, this is when I first moved to NYC.. and it was a fantastic time for me. Back in 2012 your family was starting to join Facebook, and then Facebook was this place where you would still publish photos about your trips and your vacations, photos with your friends and tag them, comment, whatever... And then Instagram was this little secret place, it already had millions of users, but it was a secret millennial place where you would post day to day random spots that you would find, and that's what I would use Instagram for, the photos that would stand out were the photos where you found the weird angle and chose the right filter. And that's fine, it's literally amateur photography. Maybe you found a friend that had some talent for composition that you didn't even know about. And we used to have Instagram cheating, I don't know if you remember this, it was cheating if you would use your DSLR photos, so Instagram was all about smartphone photos. And we loved it, right? We loved this little secret place where we could look at life through these filters. Fast forward to 2019, Facebook is not cool anymore, we all know that! There's no original content on Facebook anymore, people are no longer publishing pictures about whatever they're up to. Facebook is all about news, and fighting and controversy, fake news... But Instagram is still somewhat selective... at least on what you follow, or how much business content you get. And we have stories now. I don't hate stories, I really don't. I don't hate stories. I think that the word here is transcendence. I want to create content that's worth watching and sharing. If I'm going to spend anywhere from 5 minutes to 10 hours editing a video, I want that content to live on.. and it's fine, it's fine! I think there's content that should be ephemeral.. but in the end Stories have transformed Instagram into what it is today. I think it's still a cool platform, but Instagram is no longer the place for amateur photographers to get discovered, it's become this place where we follow our friends, where we find out what they're up to, or where we follow people that we care about like celebrities, for whatever reason we are curious about what they are up to, and I've been migrating my time on Instagram from watching the feed, to watching stories. That's the inherent problem here, if you're taking photos, it's no longer what Instagram is all about. And that is reason number one.

So now let's move on to standing out on Instagram. I've accepted... I've accepted that I can't stand out on Instagram. I'm going to tell you story to illustrate this. When I was in college I studied Digital Animation which is this very design, artsy-oriented career. I was never an artist in high school. Digital Animation is a career where you stand out if you're talented, not because you studied very hard. So one of my best friends in college was Luis Gadea. Luis would carry his sketchpad every day, every moment we're sitting, having coffee or having lunch, he's sketching. And he's this fantastic, truly fantastic illustrator. What I figured, knowing Luis, is that I'm never going to be as good as him, I'm never going to catch up to him, unless I dedicate twice the time he's already spending drawing. And that's the way it works for a lot of things in this career, you need to be very aware, and accept that there are things that you aren't that good at... and you have to leverage what you are talented at. That' in the end the conclusion I made with Instagram. I don't have the capability to stand out on Instagram as a photographer.

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