Why don't I care about posting film photos on Instagram anymore (for now)?

For seven straight months, I posted one photo a day to Instagram and had fun methodically listing the camera, lens and film used. I enjoyed all the likes, checked them too often, and enjoyed even more the written comments. And I was shooting all the time, so it just kept feeding itself. Will the joy come back? Is it just because it’s cold outside and I haven’t felt like taking cameras anywhere recently?

There are still some photographers I’ve never met whom I regard as friends on Instagram: Paul Jones, ourdaysofgold in all its incarnations, and Brett Wood. We all like each others’ photos as each one comes out. I don’t know if it has to do as much with actually liking them (although I really do), as it is more of a wink, saying “yes, you’re doing good, keep going”. Those nudges remind me that there are real people behind those accounts. I miss them when I don’t check in.

Still, the lack of a “like” mechanism on Micro.blog has had the effect of short-circuiting my need for likes on other platforms. This is a great thing, and can only be appreciated once you’ve lived with it for a while.

But I’m not leaving Instagram anytime soon. I don’t want to think too much about Facebook owning them, because that will suck the joy out of posting. I do wish that all of my favorite photographers would just move over to Micro.blog. The supportive and encouraging film photography community would be a natural fit over here.

All of this is probably less complicated than I’m making it out to be. My wife just summed it up by saying, “You’re not posting on IG because it’s cold out and this is how you operate—one obsession at a time [i.e. Micro.blog and TiddlyWiki — ok, two]. It’ll come back when it’s warmer. You don’t need to be so hard on yourself.”

(Aside: This post probably wouldn’t have been written if I hadn’t innocently started it as just a “short” journal entry in the wiki. What a sneaky and delightful app TiddlyWiki is.)

(And oh my goodness, I just found a brilliant tool called Paste to Markdown based on Turndown that I can use to convert the HTML rendering of a tiddler (copied to the clipboard) to Markdown for easy posting to Micro.blog. Holy cow.)