An Introduction to Instagram Through a 20km Run

Playing in the secret garden at Oxleas Woods

I'm not sure what took me so long to get an application for my phone called Instagram, but I'm glad I did after this weekend.  It's a simple tool that takes your smart phone camera pictures, and allows you to apply some basic filters in order to bring some life into them.  I take a lot of pictures with my phone, but once I had a play after Olive went to a birthday party on Saturday, I was pretty hooked in finding the tools full potential.

 

As you may have learnt, if I do a run, and don't set a great time (I like to run 5 minute kilometres as a training pace), I have my backup excuse being I was taking lots of pictures along the way.

I set off yesterday into my training for the Amsterdam Marathon in October with a 20km objective, and one I wanted to do well in.  As it turned out, the weather changed from sunny to wet, to windy, to... whatever it pleased to sap my morale, as my legs started to feel heavy, and I knew the total time was going to come back slow.  1 hour 46 mins isn't too bad, but I was expecting around 1 hour 40 mins in the end.

Lucky for me, I was ready to start taking pictures, as I knew it would be an interesting route through Greenwich Park, and back along the River Thames, and given the moody weather, it added more potential to trying to get some of that life in the pictures.  Although it heavily attacks whatever pixelation a phone camera may have, I like the noise (grainy effect) this gives, and the results are pretty impressive.

Peter Burke assembly at Woolwich Arsenal

I quite like this different perspective of the o2 arena from above the Blackwall Tunnel, a side to London that you rarely see

The Greenwich Power Station

The newly restored and opened Cutty Sark