Gallery: Bulb Photowalk Inspires Instagram Shooters

A group of photographers earlier this month to document the unique environment. See a select group of their photographs here, and find the rest online at http://web.stagram.com/search/Bulbwalk.

The group's leader, Laurie Higashi, shared this description of the walk with Albany Patch:

I live in Oakland and am a massage therapist by trade. I've been on (photo sharing website) Instagram since last December. I've been organizing photo walks here in the East Bay since April with my friends Jose Rodriguez (@calimex) who lives in Berkeley and Julie Lester (@jakl5) from El Sobrante.

So far we've done four - one in Emeryville/W. Oakland, one in Berkeley, one at the Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland and the one at the Bulb last weekend. We have a rough plan to do one a month.

None of us knew each other before Instagram - we all connected through the app, which was a completely unexpected but amazing result of being on IG. There's a really incredible community vibe among the people who are heavy users of the app - people are literally making friends with others around the world through their shared love of photography.

The photo walks have given us an opportunity to transform virtual friendships into real ones and build community on a local level. I've made some great friends through Instagram whom I probably would never have had the opportunity to meet otherwise, and I can't say that's the same with Facebook or Twitter.

With the exception of the cemetery walk, which was a pretty focused topic, we try to choose our photo walk locations based on diversity of things that might be interesting to photograph. We tend to gravitate to a mixture of art and nature, and I can't think of a more perfect place for that than the .

It was suggested by one of our regular photo walkers, Chris Becker (@beckczar) who's a huge Bulb enthusiast and has spent a lot of time out there. (I had considered it as a location for the first walk I organized but I'm glad we waited, since our numbers have doubled since April.)

Even with 17 people shooting pictures for almost three hours, it was impossible to catch all of the cool things there are to photograph out there. I'm sure we'll do another Bulb photo walk, probably next spring.

With Instagram growing at the rate it is, I'm guessing we'll probably have at least double the number of participants the next time and still not be able to capture all of the incredible sights at the Bulb. 

Learn more about instagram and download it for your iPhone at http://instagram.com.