Instagram was bought for a billion. I signed up. Used it a few times. Now, I rarely use it. At this point, many of the photos I see posted are all looking the same to me.
If I were Facebook, I would have bought Snapseed, a photo app far superior, in my opinion, to Instagram but not discovered by the millions. But, what do I know? I’ve been an Apple user since 1983 and despite having bought thousands of dollars worth of Apple products over the years, I have bought not one share of its stock. Mergers and Acquisitions are nowhere in my skill set.
But, not only do I prefer Snapseed as the photo app for my phone, I recently purchased the complete collection of NIK software filters. They are the company behind Snapseed.
One of their online tutorials begins with a quote from Ansel Adams that essentially says, “Great photographs are not taken. They are made.”
The Nik software already has made me rely less on my Photoshop skills by allowing me to make subtle as well as tonal changes without individual layer masks. It also wakes up the echoes of my photo darkroom supervisor in Heidelberg, Germany: Herr Tkach was a soft spoken formal man from Czechoslavakia. He worked at the Army Headquarters in Heidelberg and ran the photo darkroom which was available to all military and civilian personnel assigned to headquarters. He experimented with his color landscape photos of Heidelberg and one, a 16 X 24 “solarized” print, was completely unrecognizable as Heidelberg. That’s the one I liked.
Would I like it now? Probably, not. But, the point to all us in the darkroom watching him–that a photograph was made in that darkroom as much as it was when we clicked the camera shutter.
Trying out some of these Complete Collection Nik software filters is like hanging out with the quietly powerful Herr Tkach.
Did I ever say “thank-you”? Probably not as clearly as I can now.
Thank you, Herr Tkach! I smelled faintly of that orange tinted fixer for years afterward, but I found a bit of myself, with your help, making photographs in your darkroom.
Check out Snapseed if you are Instagram person. I presume you like the creativity that Instagram gives you? My guess is you’ll switch to Snapseed and then go out and rob a bank and buy your own complete Herr Tkach-NIK package, too.
If Herr Tkach were alive today I’d offer to market his webinars.
