Instagram Tips and Tricks for Runners – Just Run Series

Welcome to another installment of the Just Run series with me and some other running coaches and bloggers: Angela, Sarah, Nellie, Allie, Laura, and Sandra! In case you missed last month’s post, we started off 2018 with tips for beginner runners – you can read it here.

This is our third year of collaborating to bring you all kinds of running goodness! In 2016 we brought you 12 months of Workouts for Runners, then in 2017 we shared running tips, tricks and advice in our Run It series. This year’s Just Run series is a mix of helpful advice, and some fun topics related to running. Today’s post is one of the fun ones…Instagram tips and tricks for runners. 🙂 You’ll find out some of the behind-the-scenes secrets of the running photos we take, and we’ll be sharing tips and tricks for your own photos on the run, if that’s how you roll, and if you’re not an Instagram-or-it-didn’t-happen runner, you can use these tips for regular photos too!

Also, are you following us on Instagram? Click the names for everyone’s IG profile: Me, Angela, Sarah, Nellie, Allie, Laura, and Sandra.

I’ve actually shared with you some behind the scenes magic before…and made fun of myself in the process. Check out my Behind the Scenes of My Instagram Feed as well as my post More Instagram Fails! They’re worth it, I promise. 

GETTING THE RIGHT SHOT

We all know how to take a selfie, as well as the ubiquitous shot of the feet. But how do you get the photos where you’re actually running? Contrary to what you may suspect, running coaching and blogging income does not stretch to having a personal photographer follow us out on every run to get the perfect Instagram pic. Instead, this is where a few little photography tricks come in, using your phone’s self-timer for delayed still photos, or using the video setting.

The self-timer is an easy way to get the right shot, especially because most phones’ self-timer actually takes a burst of images, which you can scroll through and select the right frame from later. The timing, however, takes some trial and error. In this post, I shared that I have dozens of frames of an empty trail sometimes, when I completely mis-time the camera going off. Oops.

But, if you can’t get a handle on the self-timer, you can always try video!

You can see this picture is actually a screenshot from a video I took on my phone. This was a few weeks before I started a trail running class last summer at my work, and I wanted some images to use to promote the class. I set up the phone to video, then ran up and down this hill slowly a couple of times. The ‘slowly’ part is key – it feels a little odd, but it helps avoid every frame being blurry. Once you have the right screenshot, you can crop it, and edit it to polish it up a little more (I have tips on editing a little further on!).

USING THE LIGHT

Use the light that you have to play with different effects in your running photos. On a summer’s day in the afternoon, the light is going to be strong and intense, so that time of day can be perfect to get a fun photo of your shadow running, since the shadow will be nice and dark.

I love to use light leaks to add some atmosphere to some of my photos. In the photo below, for example, I was enjoying the gorgeous afternoon light at the top of Mt Tom, which is one of my favorite places to stop and take a break in a long run (mainly because I’ve just finished running up, up, up the trail on the side of the mountain, but also for the views.) Taking the selfie into the sun might be against “proper” photography rules, but it captured the feeling of bathing in that late afternoon sunshine that I wanted to share.

Pre-dawn or in the evening (both times I rarely run, so I don’t have an example of my own) are great time to try a silhouette picture, where you running are the silhouette against the background.

PLAYING WITH ANGLES

I have taken photos of hills that have kicked my butt, and when I look at the picture, it looks kind of…flat. Like not really a hill. And if you’re a running blogger and you want to share that you just nailed x number of repeats on a terrible hill, it doesn’t have the same punch when your IG photo looks like a gentle slope.

This is where playing with angles can help.To get those shots on a hill to show that it actually IS an incline, I try to position the phone at the top of the hill to take the photo of me running up the hill, because the height of the camera better indicates the grade of the hill. 

Playing with angles works for everyday photography as well – for example, if you’re photographing kids, it’s fun to get down to the floor to photograph at their level and point of view.

We’ve all seen the “flat runner” photos of the runner’s clothes and gear laid out and ready to go the night before a race – something like that is perfectly photographed from a birds-eye-view, tableau angle. For example, check out my Instagram post below. You KNOW I had a little moment when I found my eldest son’s Batman costume laid out “like Mama’s running clothes” before Halloween last year. 🙂 Be still my heart.

 

Someone set out his Halloween costume all ready to go for Tuesday night as #FlatBatman 😂❤ Can you tell his mama is a runner? 🤔😜 #Batman #Halloween #crimefighting #finefitday #motherrunner #costume #hesready

A post shared by carlypizzani (@carlypizzani) on Oct 28, 2017 at 1:53pm PDT

Getting up close and macro with photos on the run works great as well – over the winter I went out running in very cold weather and had my first experience with “Canadian mascara”, so a super close-up selfie captured it perfectly.

YOU SHOULD FRAME THAT

Just like the angle you’re taking the photo from, think about the framing, or composition of the photo and how that can make it a more interesting picture. You can play with composition either when you’re taking the photo, or in the editing stage, when you can play around with cropping and straightening or rotating your image. When I take a photo of myself with the landscape, for example, I like to make the landscape the focus, so I will either compose it with me off to one side, or just have a close up of one part of me with the landscape in the background. Here are a couple of examples:

 

EDITING WITH APPS

Every running blogger has their favorite apps, and these are the ones I use a lot now (or have in the past). First up, for editing on your phone, I use either Pixlr or PicMonkey. Pixlr is a free app, and PicMonkey can be free (I use the premium paid version on my laptop, so while the app was free, when I’m signed into it, I get all the premium features. You can do their free version, but it doesn’t include all the bells and whistles). PicMonkey is what I use on my laptop to really make the images for Fine Fit Day look polished, but until recently I was underwhelmed by their phone app (it’s much better now). Pixlr is easy to use, and has more features than you would expect in a phone app, and is perfect for online images like Instagram photos. For a photo I’m just using for IG, I will usually just use Pixlr…if I get stuck on something I’ll see if I can tweak it in a different way on PicMonkey.

I also use an app called Filters (screenshot below). I paid $1.99 for it, and for the massive amount of just filters alone, it’s worth it. It also offers basic editing as well, so you can edit and filter in the same app if you like.

It has so many filters that I keep my go-to’s in a handy favorites folder so I’m not scrolling through literally hundreds of filters to find the one that works every time.

I haven’t used FitSnap in a while (probably because I haven’t been training for a race in forever), but that app does a nice job of offering different text overlays for running stats, or other forms of workout if you want to use it for those too.

Splice is an app I’ve been using over the past year to quickly edit videos and I LOVE it. It was originally a GoPro app, and it’s remarkably easy to use – I taught myself just by trying it out – and you end up with a really polished, professional video as a result. Here’s an example of a video I edited on my phone using this app:

 

I hope these Instagram tips and tricks have given you some ideas for your own social media posts! Now please go check out my friends’ posts on their IG feeds and how they make them look so great!

Angela – Happy Fit Mama

Allie – Vita Train for Life

Laura – This Runner’s Recipes

Nellie – Brooklyn Active Mama

Sarah – Run Far Girl