Social media : trying to keep up.

I enjoy using social media for sharing my work, experiences and things that I think are cool, interesting or inspiring. Instagram is my favourite and I have recently been told that I need to be using Insta- stories - this is the future, apparently.  I watched a fantastic live tutorial on Instagram tips by Sarah Akwisombe who is a stylist but she also runs @nobullschool offering business courses.  Sarah's first tip was to use Stories to show a more behind the scenes view of what I do & how I do it. Her advice and tips got me all fired up to give it a go. I enjoy watching other peoples' stories, some are tutorial style on how they do things, others are funny and relaxed as snippets of daily life are shared. 

So for those of you who follow me on Instagram , you may have noticed that in the past few days I have indeed started a 'Story'.  Not wanting to be left behind, I tentatively uploaded a few pictures and played around with some of the options - to get a feel for it. So far, so good. Then I got brave. Seeing and enjoying how other people talk naturally to the camera, sharing the fun in their day with their personalities shining through, I thought I'd give it a go.  Haaahaa! Oh Lordy!

I started by sort of narrating a bit of video of some of my ceramics.  I'm not entirely sure what happened to my voice, but I sounded like a pilot on that speech just before take off, you know the overly calm ....."Good afternoon, this is your Captain speaking.  We will be travelling at an altitude of 37,000ft...."  . Ridiculous! It made me laugh, so I left it & uploaded it to my story.

Next, I tried talking to the camera directly, with my face! I know! What was I thinking!  Other people make it look so easy!  Me? I am so awkward that I talk at such a rate that you can't follow what I'm saying and/or I just look really, REALLY serious when the vibe I was actually going for was natural, quippy and fun!  If you saw it, you'll know what I mean.

Apparently, the talking to camera stuff gets easier the more you do it.  I'm not sure that will be the case for me.  It's fun though, so if, I said IF, I do it again and you think I look desperately serious and sound ridiculous, could you please just bear with me while I work on my happy, relaxed and witty front-of-camera persona. 

Or, perhaps I should just let my work speak for itself!

The very natural Sarah can be found on Instagram @sarahakwisombe.