FOREVER 21 WILL TRANSFORM ANY INSTAGRAM PHOTO WITH SPOOLS OF THREAD

Want to see yourself in thread? This is some of the most imaginative marketing I've seen in a long time. The prototype company Breakfast has created an insanely complex billboard made up of spools of colored thread. 6,400 spools, to be exact, with 36 different colors that can mechanically create any Instagram image that is tagged appropriately with the hashtag #F21ThreadScreen. And clothing company, Forever 21, will display your image on their billboard for the world to see for free! Yes, you heard me right. You can have your image displayed in 60 x 60 pixels for the world's eyes. That's nearly 5 bit glory.



This nifty bit of engineering came from the creative minds at Breakfast, a Brooklyn based company, that has become known for their innovative use of hardware to build installation pieces for Instagram.  So what is this contraption? It's 2,000 pounds of mechanical genius that's made up of 6,400 spools of colored thread and 200,000 parts. There's over 6 miles of total thread and when you take into account soldering joints and such, it takes that parts count up to over 600,000. To say that this thing is complex is really an understatement. Just look at the breakdown of a sliver of the machine in the image below.

If you want to see your Instagram images built on the Forever 21 Thread Screen live, simply mark your image with the hashtag #F21ThreadScreen and hop on over to the official live Thread Screen page to watch it happen. But hurry, this campaign will only last from now until July 28th.

Instagram Goes Bigger!

It would appear that Instagram has finally pushed past it's measly original resolution of 640x640 and almost doubled it to 1080x1080. That's pretty exciting. Go bigger or go home, right? I'm not a heavy "Instagram-er" by any means, but I did notice a some of the images on Instagram looking slightly better. I'm almost positive the heavy users out there have noticed a difference right away. As a matter of fact, while on a trip this past week, I posted a picture from our trip and quickly took note that it seemed to look a lot better than usual.

Lunch #Savannah #travel #iphonography #exploring

A photo posted by @ajharter24 on Jul 7

It's interesting that Instagram hasn't made an official announcement about this glorious update. In my daily surfing of the interwebs, I come across all kinds of chatter about this particular piece of gear or that hot new app, and everyone has an...well, you know...opinion. Among other things. But I digress. Photographers are always worried about resolution, and rightly so. I've read lots of opinions from photographers as to why they haven't jumped on the Instagram wagon, and they all have to do with image size and resolution. They say it's not up to snuff with a professional portfolio sharing tool. But will they change their minds now? No telling.

All I know is that I use it. I love it and enjoy it. It will be interesting to see if this change brings about an increase of users in the realm of pro photographers. No matter what, keep snapping and keep sharing!

Cheers!