Making Instagram Worthy Photos

A tried and true Instagram worthy photo: the jumping shot. We’ve all seen them, liked them, and often tried and failed to do them. Timing the jump with the photo and while making a cute face… All but impossible.

Or at least, that’s what some middle school makers thought when coming into MetaMedia this past Wednesday.

In a photography workshop, makers were taught about a major innerworking of cameras: shutter speed. The shutter is like a curtain in front of the camera that opens when the camera fires. It determines how much light the camera sensor is exposed to. If you think of the shutter as a eye, a faster shutter is like blinking very rapidly, whereas a slower shutter is like a slower sleepy blink. A faster shutter speed produces a crisp clear image, like those you see in sports photos, and a slower shutter speed produces blurrier photos that follow the motion of the object.

As complicated as this sounds, these makers understood this wonderfully. Taking the concepts they learned in workshop, they went around MetaMedia photographing everything and anything. Some of their shots are below.

Not only did these makers take some great photos for Instagram, they learned how an important piece of technology works. They took their understanding of cameras from basic (i.e. press the button and you will get a photo) to intermediate (i.e. changing shutter speed produces this effect). They produced the very photos they like on Instagram. A main goal of MetaMedia is to take kids from consumers to producers… And that is exactly what we did.