140 Illustrated Haikus
tags: haiku, Instagram, Mark’s Journey, photo essay, photos, story, trip
All my Bags are Packed (Photo: Mark McGuire, CC-BY)
On 12 October 2012, I flew out of Dunedin, New Zealand, headed for a conference in Vancouver (Open Education 2012). As I waited for the plane to board, I flicked through the stream of images from people whose work I follow on Instagram, a photo sharing/social media service (Facebook purchased Instagram for $1bn back in April 2012). As well as sharing photos with my Twitter followers, I noticed that it is now also possible to send a photo to a Tumblr blog, as well as to Facebook, Flickr, foursquare, and to email addresses. I hadn’t used Tumblr for a long time, but I thought it would be a good idea to collect and archive my Instagram photos on a Website set up specifically for the purpose. So, I quickly created Marks’s Journey (not very original, I know), and snapped a photo of the plane that I would momentarily board, which I used to illustrate this post. My plan was to use the Tumblr blog only for the photos that I would take during my one-month trip to Vancouver, Manchester, London, Toronto, Wellington, and home again to Dunedin. I added one further constraint — the captions would all be in the form of a haiku (three lines of five, seven, and five syllables). By the time I returned to Dunedin, I had tweeted and published 140 illustrated haiku to the Tumblr blog via Instagram (Twitter users will understand why I stopped at 140). To see them all (in reverse order) visit Mark’s Journey.
Mark McGuire's Blog 