What is Project Beauty of Life?
Project Beauty of Life is a photography Instagram page that I created during my first year of university around 3 years ago. The page was dedicated to showing my audience the beauty of nature and to remind them that there is a beautiful world out there. I felt like this was a really important topic due to the current state of climate change, that being the issue of climate change and the resultant impact it is having on nature. I believed that by creating a project dedicated to the beauty of nature, I could remind people of this and influence them to make even just small changes in their life to preserve it.
In the beginning of this project I placed a lot of pressure on uploading 1-3 times per week and hence my project suffered. I began to feel as though the project was a chore and I lost my passion for photography. Over the years I found that by uploading less regularly and taking the pressure off the project, I slowly began to regain my love for photography. Hence, I decided to continue the project throughout my final semester of BCM.
My Instagram page is dedicated solely to uploading images that I have taken that are of, or relate to nature. This primarily includes animals, plants, or landscapes. Upon learning that the final project for this course would be an advanced digital artefact with a collaboration component, I wanted to try and work with my already established digital artefact.
Originally I joined the creative services team but I realised after a few weeks, my project didn’t really align with the team so I carried on by myself. My project was centred around promoting my photography and offering my services to others. This meant I would be either taking photos for people, editing photos or making suggestions for how people could improve their own photos. My aim was to aid people with their own projects.
Each week, I focused on editing my own images or taking new ones and promoting them on my page. Although I was consistent with posting and tweeting, this did not gain much traction with my audience.
In the end, I decided to update my project by working with another student to create a new logo. She created me a beautiful new logo featuring a bear with some Australian eucalyptus leaves.
My original inspiration came from other nature photographers. I came up with the idea to intertwine the message of climate change after taking a geography course around the same time I began creating this project.
Utility
The current utility of my project is to aid people in enhancing their own projects. I aimed to do so while keeping to the theme of nature, so I only used nature photos during this process. Each week I uploaded an image or tweeted an image I had taken and/or edited along with a caption detailing what I had done or was working on. For example, in the below image I posted the original image along with the edited version and captioned “Working on enhancing colour this week, Lady looks fabulous”.
Thinking about this utility now, I definitely did not have a large enough following or reach to have any effect on other people. Even though I was posting regularly on Twitter and Instagram, I was not perhaps reaching my desired target audience. Hence, my project this semester did not gain much traction. I feel like I more or less chose to work on my own skills rather than really push for other people’s engagement.
In my original pitch, I stated that I would be a part of the creative services team and that I would be promoting my own content to entice my audience. My decision not to work with the creative services team I think worked in my favour. I believe that if I had continued to work with them, my project would have had no real benefit.
I think that my Twitter posts would have been more effective had I had a different audience to the BCM302 cohort. I could see that my posts were being viewed, however no one seemed to actually be in the market for anything I was offering.
As a result of my project not gaining traction, I decided maybe I should revamp. I chose to update my logo. I worked with another student, who listened to what my project was about and created a logo for me. I think this was a really good idea as she made me a really unique and aesthetic logo that was cohesive with my project.
The compulsory tweeting for this subject this semester helped with the regularity and progress of my project. Each week we were required to tweet a project update and this helped to push me to work on my project regularly.
Even if I wasn’t posting on Instagram, I was promoting my work to my peers, through my Twitter page and the BCM302 hashtag.
As a whole, I think my project was slightly anticlimactic. I feel as though the concept and idea was good but it was not executed well enough to have any impact.
Major Events During the Project
Event 1
The first official thing I did for my new project was working on editing photos. After thinking over my project, I realised I needed to do more than just take photos, so I decided to offer to edit photos. I began working on editing and enhancing the colour of one of the images I had taken of my cat. As shown below, the image on the left is the original and the image on the right is the one I had edited.
I downloaded a generic photo editing application on my laptop called PhotoScape X to edit my images. I have edited images before but this is one of the first times I had really edited seriously and with a large amount of detail. For example, I have only edited images on my own personal Instagram by putting a filter or something to that extent. Editing this photo actually took a lot of time and effort. I think it took around 30 minutes to finish, although I was taking my time to try and make the image perfect.
I posted these images side by side to my Twitter with the hashtag BCM302.
The outcome was not all that great.
My tweet was viewed on Twitter 60 times, had 1 engagement which resulted in 1 profile view. There were no likes or comments on this post.
The second major event for this project was an image I posted to my Instagram page of a corgi that I had taken while visiting China a few years ago. I decided to post this image as it aligns with the theme of my Instagram page. I edited the image and posted it along with the original as it was the first picture I had posted in a while. I captioned it “I’m back! Recently I’ve been working on editing and I am currently working towards creating content for other people”.
The post received 5 likes, reached 21 accounts – 5 of which engaged with the post. This led to 2 profile visits. When I posted this to my Twitter account with the BCM302 hashtag, the post received engagement in the form of impressions rather than likes or comments.
There were 57 impressions – 5 engagements and 4 profile visits.
I spent quite some time editing this post; between 15-30 minutes.
During week 6, I was working on editing images that my sister had sent to me to edit for her. There were a couple of images I edited for her which took me quite a long time. I sent her updates on my progress as I edited and she was very pleased with the results. I continued to use the same photo editing application through all of my images as I found it to be easy. I posted a progress update to my Twitter so that my followers and peers could see what I had been doing lately and see my work.
This tweet received 71 impressions, 2 engagements along with 2 detail expands. This was probably the most impressions I’ve received on Twitter in quite a while. Unfortunately although there was a high number of impressions, there were no comments or likes on this post.
On the 6th of September I made a post on Instagram. The image I posted was an image I had taken of one of my dogs. I spent quite some time editing the image and decided to work on enhancing the colour of the image for this particular image. I posted the original and edited versions of the image so that my audience could see what had changed from the original image and see my work. I posted the image to my Instagram page, Project Beauty of Life with a caption detailing how I was working on editing colours.
The image on Instagram received 7 likes and 1 comment which I’m sure is some sort of spam. I also posted this as a project update to my Twitter. My tweet received 50 impressions, 5 engagements which lead to 3 detail expands and 1 profile visit. Editing this image took a lot of effort. I wanted the colours to be enhanced but for the detail to still be maintained. I think in total this image took me 30-40 minutes, as I really focused for this image.
Approaching the end of the semester, I decided that my project needed a facelift. I made the choice to create a new logo, and I also contemplated a name change. I saw this as the perfect opportunity to reach out to the BCM cohort and see if anyone wanted to collaborate. I made a post on Twitter with a screenshot of my Instagram account saying “Thinking of updating my logo, any creative people want to help a girl out?”. My tweet received a few comments from people who wanted to help. I had to choose who I wanted to work with so I went to their accounts and had a look through their work. I ended up choosing to work with Bonnie. She was incredibly helpful, she asked me for details of my project and then created a beautiful new logo to go with my project.
Throughout my project I learned a lot about my social utility and audience. I learned through the events I have chosen to talk about above that my so-called social utility needed some work. In my opinion, the concept was great – wanting to remind the world that there is beauty in nature and wanting to help my audience with their photography needs. However, it was not executed very well. I think I did not project my project to the right audience or in the right manner, which hindered my social utility. Throughout each event, I could see that my posts were reaching an audience, but that no one was interacting with my posts. The lack of interactions informs me that the social utility I have chosen was not aligned with the audience I was projecting to.
Sources
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/challenge-can-better-profile-picture-lead-more-views-judy-schramm
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