2014 Community Look back: Exploring Ecuadorian Landscapes, Spreading Flowers on Paper and Spotting Human Chameleons

For more creative moments from our community this year, visit blog.instagram.com and follow @instagram on Instagram.

This week we are looking back at some of the inspiring stories we’ve featured in 2014 from around the Instagram community. Today’s spotlight is on photojournalist Ivan Kashinsky (@ivankphoto), Malaysian artist Limzy (@lovelimzy), and Texas-based photographer Emily Blincoe (@emilyblincoe).

Ivan’s photo series, “Project Mi Barrio,” juxtaposed the many faces of Equador through portraits of local people and places.

Limzy, a former art teacher, combined watercolor illustrations with flower petals for a simple, delicate series as a gift to her grandmother.

Emily, a prolific creator of thematic hashtags on Instagram, invented #chameleonportrait, where subjects of photos blend into the background.

The Week on Instagram | 162

News

• i-D: i-D’s top 10 instagrammers of 2014
• The Verge: These are Instagram’s first new filters in two years
• BBC: #BBCtrending: Ruddy Roye, Instagram photographer

Get Involved

• Weekend Hashtag Project: #WHPfairytale. View photos from the last project, #WHPwordstoimages.

Around the Community

• Remodeling the City with @dearaujo
• Envisioning Human Machinery with Obsolete Technology with @nickgentryart
• Around the World from Australia to Afghanistan with @andrewquilty

Inside the Dark, Whimsical World of @sophiarapata

For more eerie paintings and otherworldly art, follow @sophiarapata on Instagram.

“Clown witch nymph” may seem like an unusual way to describe oneself, but for Indiana-based artist Sophia Rapata (@sophiarapata), these associations perfectly match the dark, fantastical artwork she creates. “I know how to juggle, make people laugh, face paint and do magic,” she says. “I’m not really a nymph, but I love nature.” Sophia is also a musician, and often matches her original, off-kilter music with visual pieces using time-lapse videos.

A few months ago, Sophia quit her day job so she could focus all of her energy on her creative projects. Though making ends meet through freelancing has been challenging at times, she’s never looked back. “I’m obsessed with creating and I’m allergic to ‘not painting.’ If I don’t paint for at least an hour a day, my heart will stop beating,” she says. “There are a million and one things I want to do in life. It’s only up from here.”

How I Shoot: Making Silhouettes with @wacamera

How I Shoot is a series where we ask Instagrammers to tell us about the process behind the making of their photos and videos. For more of Keiko’s whimsical silhouette photos, follow @wacamera on Instagram.

For commercial photographer Keiko Kosaka (@wacamera) of Osaka, Japan, Instagram has been a place to enjoy, explore and evolve her unique style of creativity. “The one thought that’s always with me is that I want to share mysterious and beautiful images,” she says, “and I say images because a lot of my work contains prominent editing and is not just purely photography.”

Keiko creates scenes from a fantasy world made of vibrant colors, precisely timed lighting and playful shadows. She especially loves featuring silhouettes in her work, often having her closest Instagram friends pose in her photos. “All the necessary conditions have to align perfectly in order to capture a clear-cut silhouette, and it’s always a challenge.”

Here are Keiko’s tips for capturing clean and compelling silhouettes:

Camera

Nikon D700

Vantage Point

“To create a silhouette, there needs to be light. I always find myself thinking about the direction of the light source, whether it’s natural or artificially created light. With natural light, the sun is moving throughout the day, and you’ll just have to learn the angle from which to shoot to get a clean silhouette for each specific time of the day.”

Shooting

“I consciously select a simple landscape to pose my subjects so that the silhouettes don’t blend into the scenery—like walls and skies. I’m also very careful about how my models pose, such as the direction they’re faced, the position of their bodies and the props they use. Everything has to be perfectly composed so that people can still identify what the silhouettes actually are.”

Post-Processing

“All of my editing is done on iPhone and iPad. The most important thing for me is that the silhouette details are clean. I use Snapseed (iOS and Android) for basic edits and ArtStudio (iOS) to fill in colors. On Instagram, my personal favorite is the Hudson filter.”

Weekend Hashtag Project: #WHPfairytale

Weekend Hashtag Project is a series featuring designated themes and hashtags chosen by Instagram’s Community Team. For a chance to be featured on the Instagram blog, follow @instagram and look for a post announcing the weekend’s project every Friday.

The goal this weekend is to capture creative photos that feel like scenes from fairytales. Some tips to get you started:

• Your setting will be important for this project. Seek out natural landscapes in forests and fields or create an urban fairytale as you explore your city.
• Many beloved fairy tales contain elements of magic. Don’t be afraid to pull in unexpected props or costumes. From capes to teacups and anything in between, details will help create the fantasy of the scene.
• Finally, imagine your scene as a page from a picture book and try to tell a visual story with your photo.

PROJECT RULES: Please add the #WHPfairytale hashtag only to photos taken over this weekend and only submit your own photographs to the project. Any tagged image taken over the weekend is eligible to be featured Monday morning.

Meeting Familiar Strangers with @a_collage

To see more photos of collaged portraits, follow @a_collage on Instagram.

“Our identity is usually defined around our face,” explains Boston creative director Molly Tibbetts Scannell (@a_collage). “It’s what babies resonate to immediately. It’s in our DNA.” She compares her collaged portraits to familiar strangers, “(They are) people that you see everyday in a particular setting but know nothing about.” In her artwork, Molly often distorts or erases the faces. “It allows anyone that sees it to illustrate their own story. Removing the ‘identity’ brings in a bigger landscape of color and shapes. It has the ability to tell a bigger story. Maybe you see yourself. Or maybe not. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.”

Looking back, Molly assumes her deep love for art and portraits is rooted in her childhood. “I grew up in a small bohemian town where a base of artists lived. The ones that we all were closest to as kids were mainly portrait painters and sculptors. So, perhaps, that was an influence early on.”

Remodeling the City with @dearaujo

To see more of Décio’s remodeled city scenes, follow @dearaujo on Instagram.

Architect Décio Araújo (@dearaujo) fuses photography and digital art to remodel his hometown of São Paulo. By infusing wildlife and nature into urban scenes, Décio creates montages entirely on his phone to express a different perspective on daily urban life. “I try to capture the city in unusual ways so that people might become more critical of the spaces in which they live,” he says.

Décio’s photography joins his passion for architecture, which began when he was a young boy. “I used to study the colorful materials construction companies handed out at stoplights to advertise new homes,” he recalls. “I had notebooks where I would create blueprints of apartments and houses.”

When he walks through the city, Décio pays attention to the contrasts, disorder and chaos as a source of inspiration. “I believe we are responsible for the cities we live in and it is our duty to care for and preserve their identities,” he says. “We can make them safer, more equitable and attractive. My hope is to show this in its entirety through my photos.”

Around the World from Australia to Afghanistan with @andrewquilty

To see more of Andrew’s images from Afghanistan and beyond, follow @andrewquilty on Instagram.

“I try to articulate the simple, yet harsh everyday lives of Afghans. I suppose I’m fascinated to observe a young population that has known no reality but war in forty years,” says Australian photojournalist Andrew Quilty (@andrewquilty). Currently based in Kabul, he covers news events around the region, including the unfolding crises spilling across the borders of northern Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. His own life journey began very differently, on beaches in the South Pacific. “I grew up in Sydney and spent my post-high school years surfing there and all over Australia and Indonesia,” he explains. “My interest in photography came a couple of years into that, and I began to combine the two obsessions when I got myself an underwater camera housing. Over time my passion for photography—as it became my career—began to override surfing. So much so that I now find myself living in a landlocked desert of a country, Afghanistan.”

Looping Above the Clouds with @sammy_mason

On December 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright made their historic first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Today, people like 20-year-old Sammy Mason (@sammy_mason) continue to push the limits of manned flight.

You might say that becoming a pilot was preordained for Sammy Mason (@sammy_mason), who lives above an airport hangar in Santa Paula, California. “My mom is a pilot, my dad is a second-generation pilot, all my uncles are pilots and a few of my aunts too,” he says. But when he became the youngest stunt pilot to qualify for the US National Advanced Aerobatic Team last year at age 19, it was due to his own talent and persistence. Sammy uses cockpit and wing-mounted cameras to capture harrowing photos and videos of his exploits.

Sammy, who has logged thousands of hours of flight time in his life, is quick to note the risks of his stunts. “There’s seldom any second chances in aerobatic flying,” he says. But Sammy encourages those who are interested in flying to pursue their passion, and says that becoming a pilot is more accessible than people think. His advice? “Stay away from bigger airports, or you will spend more time sitting on the ground behind a big jet than you will actually flying. Find a small airport with a mom and pop flight school.” Even the costs are negotiable, Sammy says: “If you don’t have much money, most places will give you a job cleaning airplanes in exchange for flight time.”

Envisioning Human Machinery with Obsolete Technology with @nickgentryart

To explore Nick’s portraits of human machinery, follow @nickgentryart on Instagram.

“I can see some kind of haunting beauty in these forgotten items,” says British artist Nick Gentry (@nickgentryart), about the obsolete items like computer disks, film negatives, and x-rays that he collects from strangers and then assembles into human forms. “These materials combine to form a composition of interconnected histories. In a sense none of us has a singular identity because who we are is purely the result of who we have connected with.”

Nick describes his ambivalence toward this human machinery. “There’s a certain vulnerability to being human,” he says. “We are entirely dependent on the objects we create around us, increasingly so with regard to technology. The fascinating and possibly scary part for me is that it’s almost like we are building this machine that we don’t know how to stop.”