I’ve been wanting to write this post for a long time, and when I gave the blog a facelift I was finally able to make some of the  VSCO hashtags I’m going to talk about easily searchable. I’m getting ahead of myself though – let me first describe these hashtag thangs to folks who don’t know why they exist or what purpose they serve.

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I use hashtags to collect images related to one theme over time. To that purpose, I have created a number of obscure hashtags on instagram that I don’t think other people will use so that I curate my own collections. On instagram, there’s nothing I can do to stop other people from adding to a hashtag collection I already started. For example, I started a collection of photos of my niece under the hashtag #McGia. I thought I was pretty safe with that hashtag, but after posting about 50 photos using it, a wedding decided to use #McGia as their wedding hashtag. My collection of niece photos was inundated with photos of women in bikinis on the beach before this destination wedding…so I went through and changed all of the photos to use the hashtag #MccGia instead (with two c’s). I’ve also made a bunch of hashtags for recurring themes in our Humming House feed. #HummingHounds is a favorite, with images of different dogs we meet on tour, or of dogs that belong to our fans. If you follow us, you’ll different tags crop up from time to time that you can peruse at your leisure.

Unlike the open hashtags on instagram, VSCO allows you to create collections using hashtags within your own profile that are closed to other photographer’s photos. Anyone can use the same hashtags on their own profiles, and the collections only include photos that they themselves post, rather than pooling everyone’s photos together across the VSCO community. About two years ago I started curating collections of photos in my VSCO feed using hashtags. I’ve been meaning to share them for a long time, because I think they provide some fun insight into our lives on tour. So I’m happy to finally share some of these collections with you! You can find them in the dropdown menu above labeled VSCO.

Under “lodging” you will find a collection of photos of some of the places we’ve stayed over time. I started taking photos of our crash pads because the juxtaposition from one night to the next in terms of our sleeping situations can be wild. We can go from having our own rooms in a lovely lodge in the mountains to all crashing on the floor of a good friend’s apartment. We’ll stay in someone’s beautiful home in New York and the next night we’ll be in a seedy motel in the middle of nowhere. So many people have generously opened their homes to us across the country and it’s so fun to see how different people decorate. I just love having this collection to look back at when tour is over; it’s so variable that it is one of my favorite things to document.

Some of the other hashtags are a little more obvious…”greenrooms” gives a peek into some of the stranger / cooler greenrooms we’ve seen, “venues” and “crowds” show the stage and venue from our POV, “tour” shows random shots from the road, “humminghouse” always has at least one of us in the photo, “tourdoggo” shows the dogs from the road, “louisville” and “nashville” show photos from both of those cities, “portraits” is a collection of photos from my photography gigs.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy perusing some of these crazy photos from the last two years! Keep checking back if you enjoy seeing them – I am always updating these collections from the road.