My Adventures With Instagram

Instagram was launched in 2010 as a mobile phone app enabling users to easily share photographs and videos. It came with an attraction: a series of easy to use creative filters allowed the photographer to customize their work for an artistic look. Early Instagrammers used it predominantly for sharing photos taken with their mobile phones.

Today there are one hundred million active users of Instagram who upload 95 million photographs daily, taken with mobile phones as well as digital cameras.  A photographer’s standing on Instagram is based on the number of followers they have and the “likes” and “comments” they receive on their photographs.

I started using Instagram about two years ago. My main reason was to reach a global, photo-centric audience for my bird and wildlife photographs.

After spending some time learning, I realized that to have any impact, I needed to maximize followers. There are two ways to increase followers on Instagram. The easy way is to pay for followers – these followers are called “fake followers” because, when you post photographs, they are never around to see, like, or comment on them.

The hard way to increase followers is organically, by consistently sharing high quality photographs and building up a support base. I took this approach and – with some crucial help from my children - it took me almost two years to reach 10,000 followers. Along the way I accumulated over half a million “likes” on the photographs I posted on Instagram.

But other interesting things also happened.

I got to make friends. With one of them I went birding in Australia twice. A Japanese photographer, after hearing about my frustrations during a previous trip to Hokkaido, sent me a meticulously detailed itinerary to follow on my next trip there. A Sri Lankan friend supplied me with pointers to local guides when I go there looking for Leopards. From Argentina, a kind photographer sent me details of where to look for Geoffroy’s Cat, a rare and beautiful feline, in the Ibera Wetlands.

I found photographers with distinctive pursuits. One, for example, is committed to finding and photographing members of the cat family all over the world. Another only photographs sunsets in all their glory. There are plane, train and automobile photographers. The work of macro photographers gives me a fascinating, up-close look at insects.

But I still scratch my head in bewilderment at some aspects of Instagram. After I had posted a particular photograph last year, over a hundred Indonesian users “liked” it. Another photograph drew a similar response from Turks. I could not figure out how they found my photo. I concluded it had been referred in a large and secret Instagram group where they were members.

All Instagrammers get to write a very short “Bio” in their profile. Some of these are creative and humorous, such as the woman who said her three hobbies were breakfast, lunch and dinner!

While I am far from understanding (or utilizing) all of Instagram, I have found it to be a powerful way to reach people around the world with my photographs and show them the beauty of nature in Bangladesh and other countries.

facebook.com/tangents.ikabir or follow “ihtishamkabir” on Instagram.