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Unlikely expertise: Dhani Jones: How you can be an Instragram sensation, too

When New York was hit with a freak hail storm recently, former Eagles linebacker Dhani Jones had just taken off from LaGuardia Airport in Queens. He took out his cell phone, snapped a shot out the window of the whirlwind of hail, hooked up to the flight's wifi and posted the photo to Instagram. The Weather Channel retweeted Jones' photo and by the time he landed the image had gone viral. It popped up all over the Internet and eventually ended up as the front page of the New York Daily News.

Aside from being a bow-tie buff, Dhani Jones has quite the eye for photography. (AP Photo)
Aside from being a bow-tie buff, Dhani Jones has quite the eye for photography. (AP Photo)Read more
    by Molly Eichel
    Published 

When New York was hit with a freak hail storm recently, former Eagles linebacker Dhani Jones had just taken off from LaGuardia Airport in Queens. He took out his cell phone, snapped a shot out the window of the whirlwind of hail, hooked up to the flight's wifi and posted the photo to Instagram.

The Weather Channel retweeted Jones' photo and by the time he landed the image had gone viral. It popped up all over the Internet and eventually ended up as the front page of the New York Daily News.

Jones, who has had prolific post-football career in TV — appearing on Spike, VH1 and the Big 10 Network — is also highly accomplished on the other side of the camera. While at the University of Michigan, he was a photographer at the school's paper, the Michigan Daily. His Instagram feed (d0057) is full of beautiful landscape shots.

When he's not using his smartphone to snap photos, Jones prefers a Canon 5D.

We called him to ask for some tips on taking the best photographs:

"Never shoot standing straight up." Jones says everbody shoots dead-on at eye level. To add drama, "always shoot from an obscure angle."

"Believe in the power of thirds." The rule of thirds is an old photography standby. Don't put your subject smack in the middle of the screen because it leads to a boring image. Instead, mentally break up your frame into vertical and horizontal thirds, like a tic-tac-toe box. Place your subject at the intersection of two tic-tac-toe lines.wo tic-tac-toe lines.

"Take pictures in the morning and during sunset." Photographers call this window "the golden hour," Jones says. "It always makes your image that much more brilliant."