Christmas on Instagram

These of you who follow also my other blog know now that I am posting now on Instagram as well, but as (still) not everyone has access to these feeds, some of the images will be available here as well. I am pretty much pulling Annie Leibovitz nowadays (as she famously said that she nowadays notoriously takes pictures with her iPhone) - either taking pictures with my phone (bad bad bad) or in the studio with my medium format film camera (love love love).

I am also starting to notice some patterns which suprise me but frighten me as well as  when I started this blog it's purpose was more to be a kind of a personal diary/archive rather than amassing thousands of followers! It is quite refreshing but also frightening to find myself in a community of 20-something aspiring photographers who tend to float the feeds that contain:

- pretty pictures of food (thousands of 'likes' when you post a picture of macaroons)
- cute dogs (preferably french bulldogs)
- anything by Chanel (preferably en masse)
- girls in geek glasses and bright red lipstick, preferably accompanied by a topknot hairstyle or at least a blunt fringe (I assume that the fact that not everybody can pull off a red lip makes these kind of pictures extremely aspirational. I certainly cannot pull anything bright on my lips, cannot put up a topknot due to the hair lenght issues and my glasses come out only in emergency as their lenses are so thick I look like a mole when wearing them - 3 x no!)
- overphotoshopped landscapes (especially when authors went overboard with HDR treatment)
- anything treated with a vintage yellow filter (cannot wait for this 'fashion' to blow over)
- ligth flooded interiors

That list could go on and on and I already need to make an escape.

Meanwhile some pictures that joined my feed during Christmas for you to see if you are not following.

1st image:
Top row: my scrimpy Christmass tree (I just hate when January comes people just chuck out their lovely christmas pine trees so I decided to get a miniature one this year and try to plant it somewhere after Christmas instead of throwing it into the skip!) and a faulty reindeer display. Bottom row: girls having fun at Claudine's Post-Christmas get-together (it must have been a picture of Simon in his Santa's little help headgear that made us laugh so much) and my friend Simon, who came appropriately cladded for our pre-Christmas drink at the National Galleries of Scotland cafe.

2nd image:
Top row features traditional Christmas cake (with a skidding robin) and Christmas pudding (with a brandy flame). Bottom row shows you a Christmas bubble at our friends in Haddington and an indecent snowman that Simon spotted at a farmer's market in Edinburh (well, he spotted the snowman and then quickly added the indecency from some potatoes laying around...):