Oxford has a very active Twitter community, and I’ve probably made more friends through Twitter than any other way since living in the area. It won’t surprise you to learn that many of my Twitter friends are also photographers (I feel a Venn diagram coming on…), and naturally Instagram has a growing community in Oxford.
So when I heard fellow Instagramers Natasha (aka Candy Pop) and Rosie (aka Oxford Rosie) were organising an Instameet, meet up of Instagram folk, I just had to go along.
I met up with Natash, Rosie, and lots of people I’d never met before at the Jam Factory. After a coffee we set off and walked along the canal and into the Jericho part of town. I saw lots of bits of Oxford I’d never seen before – doing this with a group of people makes you feel a lot safer when you’re walking around viewing the world through a lens.
Although Instagram is a mobile photography platform I decided to take my ‘proper’ camera to get the most out of the day. So I packed my Olympus OMD E-M1 along with 12-40mm and 70-300mm lenses, knowing that I could use the wireless function on the camera to transfer photos to my phone for editing and uploading in the Instagram app.
As Instagram photos are square (no, I don’t believe in the new-fangled non-square formats!) I set my camera to take photos in a 1×1 aspect ratio so that I was composing correctly. For the photos of flowers, below, I used manual focussing with the focus peaking function to get the focus and depth of field correct.
My ten photos from the day are below, and if you’d like to follow me on Instagram you can here.
If you’d like to see the photos others took, search for the hashtag #oxfordinstameet or look up @shotatanangle, @candypop.uk, @ibasicallytravel, @jazza, @charis.magick, @annamundayox, @independentoxford, @kinshipofoxford, @benm.photo, @igersoxford, @makingforliving, @byvanessaleigh, @bazmund, @gemblina, @lifesasneeze.
