Sometimes visual inspiration is the best kind of inspiration. There’s just something about an interesting photograph that gets those neurons firing and makes us itch to write.
If you’re not already familiar with Flickr, it’s a website where thousands of people share photographs.
Some photographers retain all rights to their work, so you can only view their pictures. Some allow use of their photos under certain conditions (such as not changing the photo in any way, or only using their photos for non-commercial purposes). Some photographers allow full access to their photos for use elsewhere on the internet, or in commercial copy or books. Many have a mixture of photos available—some with all rights reserved, and some that are available under the creative commons licence.
A lot of the pictures you see on Write It Sideways are creative commons licensed photos.
The great thing about Flickr, is not only the sheer quantity of photos available, but the quality of photos. It gives you free access to some of the most amazing photographs taken from around the world, and even though you might not be able to reuse all of them on your blog, you can still use them to help you get inspired.
Here are five ways to do just that:
1. Search for something specific.
Sometimes when I’m in the mood to get inspired by some photos, I’ll type something specific into the Flickr search box. For example, if I feel like writing about my hometown, I’ll type in its name. That brings up several pages of photos taken there, and I can browse through the results.
2. ‘Explore’ Flickr.
Go to Flickr’s homepage and look at the top of the screen. You’ll see a category that says Explore.
Within that category, you can browse all kinds of neat things like interesting photos from the last seven days, a world map or calendar of photos, and most recent uploads.
3. Subscribe to a photostream.
If there are photographers whose work you really admire, you can subscribe to their photostreams, so whenever they post new content, it gets sent to you automatically. This is an easy way to get inspiration with little effort on your part.
You never know—maybe the next picture to turn up in your inbox will be the one to spark an idea for your next novel.
4. Choose a blog photo before writing your post.
Here’s one thing I’ve often done when I’m not quite sure what I want to blog about: I choose a blog photo before writing the post. Once I’ve found an interesting photo, I’ll think of how I can tie it into a writing-related theme. Dozens of my articles have been written this way, and it rarely fails.
If you’re looking for a creative commons photo, you can conduct an advanced search here.
5. Create a picture folder.
Whenever you discover an especially inspiring picture, save it to a digital folder on your computer so you can return to it whenever you like. You can even create subfolders to categorize pictures by subject or theme.
Do you use Flickr for writing or blogging inspiration? What other ways can you think of to use photographs for inspiration?
I love Flickr! I used to spend hours on there just browsing through all the different kind of pictures.
I do have a question, that hopefully you can help me with. When you are on Flickr, how do you know which pictures are part of the creative commons license? I know you mentioned on my blog how I need to be careful with that, so any tips on that?
Sorry it took me so long to get back to you, Ashley! You can do an advanced search where only creative commons photos turn up in your search results here: http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/?
When you click into a photo, there’s a subcategory that says LICENCE on the righthand side. Under it will be one or more icons, which you can click on to see the restrictions.
Hope that helps!
I use Flickr photos with Creative Commons License all the time, especially for freelance graphic design projects. There are some amazing photos you can find that often only ask for attribution (easy enough) if you want to use them, and it is much more cost effective than buying a stock photo. the only downside is sometimes it takes a couple hours to find the perfect photos (or maybe that’s just me!).
Sometimes I use photos for inspiration about a location, maybe a place I haven’t been in a while or haven’t visited. The photo helps me solidify the words swirling around in my head. I also use photos to make characters. Sometimes (and I’ve used art for this too) I just see a person and a story just jumps out at me. Something in their expression or how their dressed or what they are doing speaks to me. I really love to look at black and white photos of people because I think there is so much character in them and if it is a really good photo, you can see the magic in capturing a single moment in history, in someone’s life story, like a chapter in a book. You just have to figure out what happened to get those people to that moment and what happens next.
Ashley– You can find out what type of license a photo has by looking on the right-hand side of the page (of a particular photo). At the top you should see the name of the person who took the photo, then underneath that their photostream, then tags on the photo, and underneath that it says license and that is where you will find out what type of licence the photo has. If if click on that license, it will explain what you have to do to use that photo.
You can also google flickr creative commons and search for photos under a particular license. I usually search under the Attribution license, which allows you to use a photo as long as you give credit to the owner.
Flickr is great for all these things. I also like Morguefile.com. The pictures are free to use without attribution. You can modify them in any way you choose.