One of the web’s fastest growing sectors is social media that allows users to take advantage of the very sophisticated, growingly excellent cameras built into their smart phones. These applications (“apps”) include Apple’s iPhoto and its successor Photos, Tumblr, Pinterest, Hipstamatic, SmugMug, Twitter, Posterous, Flickr, and Facebook, which owns the subject of this review, Instagram.

Instagram isn’t for everyone. It takes rectangular photos from your phone’s camera and makes them square, which is a little odd, and resizes them to 640×640. (It does leave the original image in your photo library.) Odder still are the filters, which go by pretentious and not-very-explainatory names like Lark, Slumber, or Perpetua. The filters are all subtle variations of about four or five motifs, like vignetting, fading, contrast enhancement, and grayscaling.

For reasons that are still little nebulous to me, Instagram’s square format and faded-print-look filters tend to encourage the use, and overuse, of negative space. I also find that with me, at least, Instagram is not my first choice for “everyday” photos like snapshots, but is my go-to app when I am trying to appear artistic to my audience.

Any smartphone app, even the built-in camera app, as well as any live-view cameras that don’t have a viewfinder, make it difficult, sometimes approaching impossible, to shoot in bright sun, since the sun can shine on your viewing surface and overwhelm the image. Yesterday at the Ada Air Expo I ran into that exact problem, and found it slowed me down and gave me a headache. Even when I succeeded in making the shot, I usually walked to a shady spot to edit and post it.

Keep in mind that with any photo sharing service, even your own web site, keeping all your photos in one place, like one album on Facebook, will eventually, even with broadband internet and a modern browser, slow to a crawl if visitors are looking at the whole album. In fact, as I write this, I am seeing this very problem on someone’s Facebook page. And now might be a good time to reiterate what I tell my students again and again: no one will look at 1200 photos of anything. This might not seem important to you, unless you post your photos with the intention of sharing them.

One of the toughest tricks about taking the dive into any new image, blogging, or social media item is not letting yourself neglect all your other good creative outlets. In the same way we saw Facebook extinguish countless excellent blogs, Instagram can lead a photographer by the nose away from far nobler, more creative pursuits. My recommendation to anyone who faces this dilemma is to expand, not replace, your creative efforts.

You can see all of my Instagram images here (link).