4 Ways to Take Advantage of Instagram’s New Photo Options

Instagram has rolled out its biggest change yet: users can now post landscape and portrait photos and videos. While the updated app offers obvious advantages to amateur photographers, these four simple tips might help you take better pictures:

1. Use the extra space to create drama
When your subject is running, flying or falling from one side of the frame to the other, a portrait or landscape photo can amplify the image’s sense of motion by creating visual space where the subject will continue moving. Subjects looking to the side, too, can continue to gaze farther across the image.

2. Play with composition and perspective
While Instagram’s prior square crop called for images to be centered, more space means more leverage for composition and positioning. Now, those shots can convey a sense of space that suggests the grandeur of a landscape or tension between subjects. Both vertical and horizontal photos can include more background without feeling cramped, providing greater context and breathing space:

3. Get up close
Those beautiful rolling hills in the distance don’t have to be the only thing in the photo any more. The added height or width allows you to further dramatize your images through a low close-up shot that blurs the background and accentuates the foreground.

4. Emphasize leading lines
The classic sunset pic, with the horizon parallel to the ground, leaves a lot outside the frame when constrained to the 1:1 ratio. With the horizontal option, you have more room for “leading lines” — paths that reach towards the main subject of a photo, such as a road leading off toward a sunset — to make your beach at dusk or moonlit mountains that much more spectacular.

See Instagram's Layout App in Action