Why Instagram video isn’t for me
I’ve lived with the new video feature in Instagram for about a week and while I was originally sceptical about whether video and Instagram would be a good match, I thought it best to wait a while before forming an expressing an opinion.
The short version? Based on my experience of shooting, posting and watching, video on Instagram is appalling.
It’s possible that there was a strong commercial reason for adding video to Instagram. I’d guess it has something to do with Vine. It’s possible, very very possible that I’m in the minority and that many many many people love love love video in Instagram. But I don’t care about them. Like everyone, I have an intimate relationship with the apps I use and video is tarnishing the one I have with Instagram.Fifteen seconds is too short for good video, but Instagram videos aren’t good, at least not in my stream. They’re bad. Fifteen seconds is too long for bad video.
I’ve always loved photography and Instagram rekindled my enthusiasm for shooting and sharing what I hope are my best images. I don’t post dozens of pictures at a time, I edit and choose only what I consider the best. Instagram isn’t the place I share everything I’m doing, it’s the place I share the best of what I’ve just done. Video just isn’t something I want to share.
Video isn’t what I want to see from people I follow either. I follow people for their beautiful images, not to see a photo documentary of their lives. (I imagine that’s what Facebook’s like, but then I don’t use Facebook.)
I don’t follow many of my colleagues or even my best friends on Instagram, not because I don’t love them, but because I don’t want to see photos of their kids, or their cats, or their food. That’s the reason I follow so few people of Twitter too. I may love you very much, but I don’t care when you get dinner, who with or what you eat.
I don’t know many of the people I follow on Instagram at all, and they don’t know me. I follow them because they make photographs that I learn from to help make me a better photographer. I study light, colour and especially composition, so my Instagram stream is most often filled with beautiful photographs. Instagram’s static video poster frames just look like bad photographs. They are spoiling the quality of my stream and they’re spoiling Instagram.
I’d like Instagram to add a setting that removes video from my stream altogether. They could bury that deep on a settings screen if it aggrieves them. Failing that I may just Time Machine up a pre-video version of the app and revert to that, because video hasn’t given me anything I want. In fact it’s taken away what made Instagram special.