Not being able to travel overseas really sucks. Some are even saying travel won’t be back to normal until 2022 for some parts of the world, which sucks even more.
So how are you meant to boost your Insta-game minus the access to an airport (or the Amalfi Coast)? The answer is simple, folks. I firmly believe you can fake a picture of any great monument in your very own backyard/town/city, meaning you get all the priceless images from an overseas jaunt without any of the hassles.
I’m telling you, no one will ever know they’re fake. Plus, it’s a great way to kill a few hours during the day. A genuine win-win scenario.
Let us begin.
The Big Banana
Ok, so the Big Banana is freely accessible to anyone already in NSW, but who wants to drive all that way when you can easily get your own picture at home?
All you need is a banana, some kind of wooden ledge, a black marker and some lush foliage as an optional background.
Look at that. Flawless.
The Eiffel Tower
Ah, Paris. What a city. No trip to such a place would be complete without a shot of the grand Eiffel Tower, would it?
Here we have a little something I put together in the kitchen with some tape. If anyone questions the colours, just tell them that’s actually how the monument looks from the right angle and that every other image on the internet is wrong.
If you really wanna make this bad boy look genuine, get yourself a nice instant camera. No one questions instant photos. I used the Fujifilm instax mini LiPlay for the below and because I was feeling very fancy at the time, I used the instax feature which allows you to add a nice frame to it before printing the photo.
Ahhh, magnifique.
The Leaning Tower of Pisa
Ok, I know what you’re thinking. So far, these monuments are looking a little… lonely. Adding yourself to bootleg monument pics not only makes them look more legit, but it also maximises the fun by a factor of at least 15.
For Italy’s Leaning Tower of Pisa, I was originally playing around with a stack of plates but they weren’t really giving me the height I needed so I ended up going for a stack of toilet paper. By getting the angle just right, I think you’ll agree that it looks identical to the real monument.
Have a bloody look at that. I even got the tourist hand lean thing happening. Absolute pro behaviour here, mates.
I really wanted to get this shot with the instax mini LiPlay because, as I said before, no-one questions instant photos. To make sure I could get myself in the shot, perfectly framed for the whole ‘holding up the Leaning Tower’ schtick, I used the free instax mini LiPlay smartphone app which let me use my phone as a remote control for the camera.
Hot tip: The instax mini LiPlay can also hook up to your phone via Bluetooth, so if you do snap a beauty on your smartphone, you can send it to the camera and instantly print it on to film.
How good is that? No one in their right mind would call that a fake.
The Arc de Triomphe
We’re back in Paris, this time for a snap of the iconic Arc de Triomphe.
Pretty straightforward, just get three long boxes of your choosing and stack them in the shape of an arc. You can decorate them if you like, but I like to think that the original artworks would look a lot like shoebox brandings had they been designed in the modern age.
Hell yeah, it looks like I’m standing right in front of that bad boy. The trick is to make sure your entire person is within the arc.
The Taj Mahal
I’ll level with you, folks. I don’t really own anything that looks like India’s Taj Mahal, nor do I have any ideas of how to even begin to create it, so I took the lazy way out. I used an app on my phone to cut myself out of one pic and place it in another.
I mean this kind of editing is pretty easy these days. It took me less than 5 minutes to whip it up and looks exactly like me standing in front of the glorious monument in real life. But you know what would make look even better? That’s right, let’s print that sucker.
That’s a picture of me 100% standing in front of the Taj Mahal in real life. I’m just as shocked as you guys.
As you’ve probably already guessed, I did this to all the pictures and I will be proudly displaying them on my fridge.
As well as being an instant camera and smartphone printer in one, the instax mini LiPlay has a heap of other cool features as well. With the free smartphone app, you can even print your photos with sound. No, not in a magical Harry Potter way, it puts a QR code into the image that you can scan with a phone to play sound. Neat, right?
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have many more monuments to visit within the confines of my own backyard. Peace.
