Ready, aim, click: Up your Insta profile
AN INSTANT TREND: DALGONA COFFEE
Instagram has become a very different place, with no eating-out and no travel. Most views are now of drawing rooms and kitchens, as the world remains in lockdown for another week.
With the playing field, in that sense, levelled a bit, now is a good time to up your Insta profile. Some of the most popular videos are things you can do with little to no expertise or effort — a quirky dance, a family playing games, singing off-key a capella.
Instagram is also a good place to record your notes from these weeks lived in isolation. Here’s how you can start to improve the frame.
Always aim to tell a story: That’s what banking professional and amateur photographer Abhisek Mukherjee tries to do with every photograph. “An image should make you think, laugh or aspire to something,” he says. Recent pictures include a lamb nihari made by his wife (something viewers might want to attempt too), a glimpse of her assembling a chair so she could work from home better (context and slice of life) and a view of their garden (a quarantine diary shot).
There are suddenly pictures of this concoction all over the internet. Dalgona, a mix of chilled milk and beaten coffee, is reportedly named after a Korean candy that looks like the top half of this iced beverage. To make it, you take 2tbspeachof instant coffee, sugar and hot water and beat it all to a foam.
Keep beating till little
“My friend took a photo of his wife stockpiling toilet paper. That’s bound to make others laugh,” he adds.
Capture the beauty of the mundane: Take your camera to different corners of the house. A pretty bottle on a bathroom shelf, washed utensils glinting on granite — pick things that you peaks start to form. Put some ice in a glass and fill to twothirds with cold milk. Transfer the whipped coffee foam on top. Mix and drink.
“Even my six-year-old daughter did it, after watching a video online,” says food writer Debjani Chatterjee Alam. It tastes like coffee your grandma might have made, but looks a lot more Insta-friendly. normally miss during your daily routine, says photographer Anurag Banerjee.
Use the light: Start by focusing on natural light; plants in the balcony, sunlight through a window, says choreographer and Instagram influencer Sonal Devraj. Let it be a character in your photos, suggests Banerjee.