Remember Everyone:  ”Your photos are the best photos!”  Yes, that photo from flickr might look beautiful and when comparing it to your photo, heck it might make yours look amaturish.  But still, its your photo, its unique and it’s the only photo that tells “your story”.

I want to address something real quick. I’m going to ask everyone to use their own photos for your post when possible. I think this is important and we don’t want to look like we are just a mess of other peoples photos across the web. We want to be our own entity with our own personality. Even when your looking for a photo to showcase money, a list, passport, etc. Just grab your own and throw it on a table and take a photo. We can get really creative here and also really relevant to the post.

Think about the possibilities. Pretend you want a photo of a list, you could grab a pencil, a piece of paper and then actually scribble some words down that will actually appear as bold h3 topic points in your post. Let’s be a little more creative then just going and grabbing other peoples photos. These photos could even bring a creativity to your writing.  Here are some cool things you could make a quick sketch – photo of to go along with your post.

• A List
• A Flow chart (this could be interesting)
• A Drawing
• Diary Notes  (6-15-2012)  Dear Diary I’m in xxxx today and ….
• A Calendar with a certain Day Marked Off
• So many other Ideas!  It’s endless and it will actually spark your creativity.

Last Resort – When you just have to Use a Internet Photo:  Use Flickr!  There are literally millions of photos across a wide range of  topics.  Also, if you are grabbing images from other sites I don’t know their policy and quite frankly I don’t want to go research it to see if it’s OK to use their photo.  Flickr has a set of rules in place that allow us to use their photos as long as we provide proper credits and link back to the original.  Now not all Flickr Photos have the same Policy, some can’t be used form commercial use or edited in any way etc.  To be safe use the following links to search of photos with the proper licence.

1.)  Attribution:  You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work – and derivative works based upon it – but only if they give you credit.  http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-2.0/

2.)  Attribution-NoDerivs License:  Same as above but you can not edit the photo in anyway.  http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-nd-2.0/

Those are the safest images to use without worrying about breaking some copyrighted laws.  Just make sure your images link back to the original or authors profile as we need to give the credit, we should give them credit, they deserve it!  You would want credit right?

Make Your Own Flickr Account

Get your own Flickr Account!  I want to talk about making your own Flickr account.  It’s so Easy, you can even Use your Facebook Account to Login.  Flickr is a great community of photographers and if you are even a little bit serious about photography you should have your own Flickr account.  The great thing about Flickr is that when you upload a photo it automatically makes different sizes for you can use as necessary.  You also have a great portfolio of photos to showcase all in one place to use in all your future endeavors.  There is no need to upload all the photos to our blog as you can simply enter the URL and have the image appear in the post.  One exception:  You must upload at least a thumbnail image to our blog to use as the featured image for the post.  Remember, featured image is the one that appears on the front page representing your post.

Insights:  Last I want to talk about insights, you should see a new box when your creating a post.  Insights allows us to do a lot of different things but among them is finding images on flickr and quickly putting them into the post.  So give it a try, I have found the results to vary based on when I actually go to flick and I use the plugin as far as what’s returned but sometimes it works pretty good.  Let me know how you guys like it.

Thanks,

Michael

Just a thought, is it possible to do integration with Instagram or Pinterest from our site? This way we can have instant photos uploaded or linked. I have an Instagram accounr and use it quite extensively to take photos of interesting finds and activities.

Cheers

Elmer

Hey Michael, I think its good to have a photo gallery where photos can be linked to articles as well. Not sure how this will work. In the meantime the community area should be good since photos tell a lot of stories and it should inspire people to view and be curious.

My 2 cents’ worth.

Cheers

Elmer

I like these ideas   Thanks ELmer and Wynna, really some great suggestions coming together!  Please bash me on the head now and again and say “hey, what’s up with the photos or this or that I broughtup” as I feel I have a lot of info floating around my head now and I have a lot of sticky notes but in a really unorgainized fashion ha