Browsing by Subject "photograph"

This thesis deals with the visual preferences of Japanese Instagram users. Concentrating on the question of whether they prefer photographs with people in them over other types of photo-graphs and what are their reasons for preferring specific photographs. Material used in this study is collected with an online survey and analysed quantitatively and qualitatively with the theories and concepts of cultural studies and semantics in visual communication. Previous studies have shown that people are drawn to human faces, but as photographs with partly covered faces are also common on social media the study focuses on photographs of people where the faces are not fully visible. The survey was conducted online in Japanese language and aimed for Japanese Instagram users. 60 participants answered the survey from which 50 were eligible for the survey. The aim of the survey was to get the participants report their preferred photographs of sets of photo-graphs presented to them, and explain their choices. Gender, age and types of accounts fol-lowed in Instagram are also taken into account in analysis. The participants are mostly of ages 20–29 which makes the data highly the results for the case of these ages. The results show that no clear preference of photographs with people over other kind of photo-graphs is noticed based on the data, but the people as content in a photograph are an important factor for the preference amongst Japanese Instagram users. Other important factors that seem to affect the preference of the Japanese users were colours of the photograph, nature without any indications of people, a clear message of the photograph and highly polished visual appearance in case of food photography.