Me & Orla

I’m Sara Tasker – 40% photographer, 40% writer, 30% creative coach and 10% cake and I am the ‘me’ in Me & Orla.

I live in rural Yorkshire, England with my husband and our daughter, Orla. We relocated to this little village in the hills after a lifetime in the city, hoping to slow down, simplify and stop worrying about stupid stuff.

My blog Me & Orla is my online journal; a record of thoughts, revelations, recipes, shopping lists & things I ate in cafes. I heard the internet needed more of these things.

INSTAGRAM CHANGED MY LIFE

In January 2013, on maternity leave from the NHS awaiting the birth of my daughter, I started a photo-a-day project on Instagram. By April that year I’d hit 35k followers, and continued to grow ever since. I now have over 180K followers.

I always considered myself a writer more than a photographer, so this blog sprang up as a place to spill all those extra words.

Since then it has evolved to become the foundation for all my online work and a springboard for some of my biggest & wildest dreams. I’m passionate about helping other women and creatives find their online voice, because I know first-hand all of the huge and brilliant changes it can bring.

I run a handful of in-depth, creative programmes for people looking to take their Instagram game to the next level.

The Insta Retreat 

Do you ever look at popular Instagram accounts and wonder how they do it? What are they doing that you aren’t? How are they making this work?

The truth is that there isn’t just one magic trick – which is why I’ve put together a whole brilliant box of them. Advice and ideas you won’t find elsewhere, because these are my own, tried-and-tested, hard-earned techniques.
This course is all of my Instagram knowledge distilled.

Whether you’re an artist, a blogger, a maker or a business, The Insta Retreat will guide you, step by step, through all you need to do to create an engaging, popular and profitable account that represents all that you want it to, and becomes an essential part of your world.

7 Day Guide to Better Instagram (free)

It feels oddly scary to be sharing my Instagram secrets. I have this fear that if I equip everyone to do what I do, there won’t be enough success to go round, and it’ll all grind to a halt.

But I’m sharing anyway – partly because I just love chatting about this stuff, and also partly because deep down, I don’t really believe it’s as simple as that. You can do everything right, but without that spark – that creative something behind the images – no amount of kindling & optimisation will make an account catch fire.

The 7 day Insta-retreat is made up of the things I most often tell people when they ask for my top tips. It’s a quick start guide to upping your instagame, with 7 awesome strategies to shake up your gallery & help you focus on what you really want to achieve. All you need is 30 minutes a day, preferably with a cup of tea or a glass of wine, and some room to think.

Bloom & Grow

One summer I grew sweet peas from seed.
They shot out from the earth like fairytale beanstalks. Two foot, three – outgrowing their netting until they flopped over the fence into next door’s garden.
Turns out you have to pinch out the ‘growing tip’; if you don’t reign them in, they keep on spiralling up and don’t get around to making flowers.

It’s a pretty good analogy for Instagram, I think, especially when we get our focus wrong. Sometimes we put so much energy into growth that we forget to let ourselves bloom.

This course is an antidote to that.