Behind the ‘Gram: What You Don’t See in the Instagram Photo

Hi friends! You guys love these posts, which makes me so happy since I do too! In this Behind the ‘Gram series, I share the behind-the-scenes details of what goes into each of my Instagram photos — hint: lots of blood, sweat and sometimes tears. Keep reading for the stories behind some of my recent posts, as well as the struggles I face when capturing and editing an Instagram-worthy shot.

I took this picture to show the hairstyle I’d worn that day because I really liked it. These shots took a while to get because we couldn’t get the angle right. Looking casually comfortable is much harder to capture than you’d think and way too many of these poses looked awkward for some reason. Because of the position too, certain shots made my body look unbalanced and distorted. I’m sure everyone on Instagram saw this as a super simple and casual photo, but it took a hundred takes to get this.

I swear, I went to hell and back for this picture (not sure if it has made it’s way to my feed yet, but it likely will soon 🙄🤞🏻). I’ve talked about this before, but I’m not into being in front of the camera anyway, so incidents like this that kill the process really send me over the edge.

I loved my outfit this day, it was the most perfect weather and I was due for an Instagram pic, so we went outside to snap a quick one. We were only able to get three quick shots before the camera died (my other camera was dead too), so I took it inside to charge for a little bit. Once it gained a little juice, we went back outside and got one picture before it said the card was full. I took it back inside, deleted 1,600+ pictures, and went back out. It still said the card was full. I took it back in, deleted every single other photo off of it, went back outside and the camera died AGAIN. Needless to say, I was in a sour mood for the rest of the night out of pure annoyance and frustration. We were able to go back out and get some okay shots an hour or so later, surprisingly. On top of all this, this photo then took me far more time than I’d ever like to admit editing it to my liking. Instagram really makes me want to rip my hair out sometimes!

This was a tough one to edit because I couldn’t seem to get the colors right. My feed has a very specific color scheme based on the presets I use (LOVE Jaci Marie’s Warm preset to death), so getting my hand, product and background to be true-to-color was tricky. I even retook these photos the next day to see if I could execute it better, but I ended up going with the first photos anyway. I’m happy with the final product and how it looks on my feed, so I’ll call this one a win, even with the little bumps in the road!

I shot this photo in two locations in our house in addition to some other outfits this same day to stock up on content for the week. I like to take as many photos as possible (even though it gets old quickly for me) so I have tons of options in case some don’t turn out as planned. This was the second location in this outfit, and to my surprise, both locations turned out great and were posted days/weeks apart. I added the frame around this one because the plain white wall seemed boring to me, which I think helped.

This one took far more time than I anticipated. I wasn’t planning on having my eyes closed or looking down, but when I couldn’t keep my eyes open in the light, this pose was the best option. It was tough to get the green color of my shirt to look true to color while still matching my feed, but I was able to fix it with some tweaking. I photoshopped out the street number on our house for privacy, then added the lightning bolts and drink outline since the photo was too plain for my liking. I’d say I spent over an hour on this photo, and that’s not unusual for me.

This is another photo I shot in two different locations in our house, this one in our bedroom and one at our front door. We took the bedroom ones first and I wasn’t in love with them while editing, so we relocated and tried again. After uploading them all into Lightroom, I ended up liking the first ones most, so that whole second photo shoot was pointless. I was then torn on which edit of this specific photo that I wanted to post, so I did a poll on my Instagram story since I simply couldn’t decide. It’s crazy how indecisive I can be sometimes over something as simple as a social media post, but hey, it happens!

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That’s all this time around! I hope you enjoyed this post and got a good laugh out of it. I also hope this serves as a reminder that everyone struggles and achieving a picture-perfect feed takes way more time and effort than any of us would like to admit. I hope you’re having a great week & I’ll see you in Friday’s post!

Here’s my other Behind the ‘Gram posts if you want to check them out:

• Behind the ‘Gram: What You Don’t See in the Instagram Photo (Part 1)
• Behind the ‘Gram: What You Don’t See in the Instagram Photo (Part 2)