VFL17 In Review!

I have now published my project on the View from Leicester website under the VFL17 section as A Mini Tour of Leicester. Before publishing it I went out again to take two photos, one of which I’d use in the final post an another to use in a promotional post on the VFL Facebook page.

The photo I used at the start of my final post on the VFL site can be seen below and was taken as a teaser to put next to the introduction with Lego man out of focus in the foreground and Leicester Cathedral in focus in the background:

The photo I used for the promotional post of the VFL Facebook page can be seen below. For this I used the same teaser style as the previous photo with the Lego man out of focus in the foreground. I edited the image in Adobe Photoshop to apply the VFL17 text over the image and blended it in by lowering the opacity and using the eraser tool. This promotional post can be seen here.

To see all the posts visit the Instagram account here!

Overall the account and photo posts have received quite a good response online in the couple of weeks since it was created with the account getting more interaction through followers, likes and comments than I initially thought it would. One follower commented that on their recent trip to Leicester they did’t get a lot of time to look around and so was enjoying exploring the city through looking at the photos. This is exactly the response I wanted from the posts to make viewers want to visit these locations and if not to give them a virtual tour of these places to see what they’re missing out on. Another commenter simply said that they liked the idea behind the account. I also received a few messages on the account with one of my good friends saying how the photos had made the city look interesting and completely different to what he’d thought/seen of it before. Another message I received to my surprise was from the De Montfort University account saying that the university press office loved the idea behind the account and would like to know more about it. So overall I am pleased with the outcome of the account and still have quite a few images to use in posts which I may still upload in the remaining couple of days until the deadline and may even continue on with this account afterwards as it’s quite fun to do.

(Click the image thumbnails to view a larger version)

 

The @LeicesterLegoMan Instagram account at the time of posting.

 

More Posts!

With the photos I was posting on the Leicester Lego Man Instagram account I decided it could be improved by making use of the new “Gallery Feature” in Instagram that allows you to upload more than 1 photo in a post which the viewer can simply scroll right/left through the images.

I had therefore thought that it would be good to have the first image the same as before with the Lego man in front of the significant location/place and then following images in the gallery being a mix of other photos of the location or other shots of the Lego man in the location. This would show a wider perspective of the place, explain/show the caption information more and generally make the place more “advertising” or interesting to the viewer of the media. With more than one image each post is also potentially retaining the viewer’s attention for a longer period of time.

The first implementation of this gallery feature was when I posted about one of my favourite streets in Leicester that is probably not well known about. As seen below this post was about a Graffiti Street in the city centre called Short Street and includes 4 images; 3 of which show the Lego man in front of different locations down the street and then the fourth showing of a piece of the graffiti. This gallery was also to reposted by another Leicester related Instagram page as shown here. This Instagram gallery can be seen below:

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A post shared by Leicester Lego Man (@leicesterlegoman)

I then continued to use this gallery feature in the following posts as I felt it worked well to give a wider perspective of the location being shown and talked about in the caption. The following few posts contained a varied number of images within the gallery depending on what there was to take photos of at the location. The most was 5 images in this gallery post of Abbey Park.

Like with the previous King Richard III post I decided to customize the Lego man again when visiting the National Space Centre to create another photo with this fun/funny effect by changing it to look like an astronaut. I think this again worked quite well to make the photo more interesting and engaging for the viewers drawing them in to look through the other photos.

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A post shared by Leicester Lego Man (@leicesterlegoman)

Since posting these galleries up to this point the profile has again grown faster than I’d have thought with continually more followers and more interaction as I post photos more.

Having covered quite a lot of the major attractions/sights around Leicester now the profile photos show to some extent a “mini tour” of the city as you scroll through them. I also still have quite a few photos/photos galleries prepared to post which I will try to upload over the last few days up until the deadline but may not appear on any blog posts due to the timing.

To view all the posts and the most recent ones check out the account here!

Account Setup & First Posts

To start I firstly created the account I would use to post these images on Instagram.

After a little thought I decided to go for the username “@LeicesterLegoMan” as this was fairly self explanatory as to what the account content would revolve around. The inclusion of Leicester in the name would be a benefit as it would ensure the account appears when anyone searches Leicester and also provides an immediate connection with anyone from Leicester as the account is primarily linked to this city through this name and the content that would be made.

To finish the account setup I also took the photo below of the Lego Minifigure I would use for the profile photo:

This Leicester Lego Man Instagram can be seen here!

The first posts of the account were single images focused on the Lego man in the foreground with the significant places in Leicester featuring in the background. These started off being edited camera photos but then changed to mainly be more convenient “Instagram edited” phone photos. The captions to these images were largely informative telling the history or other information of the places with occasionally more personal thoughts/opinions captions. On each photo I used a few appropriate/relevant hashtags and the Leicester location tag to help promote the photos so they could be seen by the highest number of people possible while not coming across as “spamming” hashtags since I didn’t use anywhere near the limit of 30 allowed on one post. For one of the photos I even tried to link into an event that was currently happening too since I posted a photo of the Lego man in front of the DMU sign while it was a university open day.

A good example of one of the starting camera photos includes:

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A post shared by Leicester Lego Man (@leicesterlegoman)

Just after starting the account I had to go to London for a day in which I posted two photos on the day of the Lego Man during the trip to London like the accounts I took inspiration from did when they travel anywhere. One was a more artistic edited camera photo of the Lego Man on some of the Santander Cycles while the other was a photo taken with my phone camera and uploaded while waiting for a train. I found this quite fun taking photos with my phone, editing them in Instagram and instantly uploading them since I usually spend a long time editing photos during my other photography work.

For one photo I tried to be a bit more creative by mimicking the popular statue of King Richard III with the Lego man I would take a photo of in front of it. I did this by adding Lego minifigure parts to  man to make it look like the statue by holding up a sword and crown and wearing some armour. I then posed the man in a similar way and took a photo of it in front of the real statue. As you can see in the image below I think that this created quite an eye catching and funny post:

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A post shared by Leicester Lego Man (@leicesterlegoman)

As you can see by the screenshots below up to this point the account was doing fairly well since it had only been running a short while. The number of followers and likes was improving with every post and there had been some positive interaction from other users such as one that said they loved the idea behind the account and another that replied answering something I had written in the caption.