Happy Valentines Day everyone! Or, if you’re a card-carrying member of the “I Hate Valentines Day” club, that’s cool too – Happy Monday! I’m not really sure which camp I’m in. While I find the idea of compulsory chocolate and flower buying tiresome and purpose-defeating, I have no problem with celebrating the idea of love in general. My significant other and I usually use V-Day as an excuse to spend some time and money on ourselves and go for an extravagant dinner or a weekend getaway (that’s what we’re doing this year…although not on the actual Valentines weekend. Just to be original and rebellious. Maybe we have a little of the “I Hate” club in us, after all).
Despite all the worn-out, commercialized Valentine traditions (not to mention the buckets of tears shed by those who are reminded on this day of love that they themselves are alone and will receive no teddy bears or candy), I have a soft spot for photography. And scavenger hunts. The hashtag #2011hearts was started on Instagram a little while ago – the idea being that you snap photos of any hearts you can find in the world around you (they can be candy, drawn, clouds, actual real hearts, whatever) using your iPhone and then post them on the Instagram app with the tag #2011hearts. The goal was to to collect 2,011 heart pics by Valentines Day, but I think there’s somewhere around 2500 on there now, so good job heart-lovers! Love Valentines Day or hate it, whimsical heart-photo-hunting with an iPhone is not something I can resist. So I’m doing this post to celebrate the love of photos, and iPhones, and hearts everywhere. After all, hearts were around long before St. Valentine, whoever he was.
A few of the hearts I found, snapped and posted:
Steam on the windows + bright streetlights=love
Cupcakes at Vibrato coffee shop. Yum!
Our cat Sofie has a heart on her head. Dunno why. But it's cute.
There’s a lot of gorgeous photos that have come from this little event, so if you have an iPhone, download the free Instagram app and search up the #2011hearts tag to check it out. You can also try searching it on Twitter. There’s still a bit of time left before this event goes the way of wilted roses and day-old, half-eaten chocolates that you pretended to like but actually thought were gross – so why not go search out some hearts of your own?
P.S. My username on Instagram is devonanne, add me! I’ll add you! And we can ooh and ahh at each other’s photographic prowess!
