Using stock photos to enhance your work
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m not the most visual person. While I know a goods design or layout when I see it, I can’t come up with one on my own. That written, I also know the value of well-placed visuals in text.
As you might have noticed, over the last few months I’ve been including stock photos in the posts that appear in this space. There are three reasons behind doing that: 1) attempting to further draw readers into what I’ve been posting, 2) providing a visual counterpoint or starting point to a post, and 3) breaking up the visual monotony of the text.
I like to think that it’s worked; no one’s complained … The success (if you want to call it that) of this experiment has also bled over into other areas of my writing. I’ve been including more visuals, especially stock photos, in presentations, presentation scripts, and even a few reports that I’ve been preparing.
Sometimes it’s been hit and miss — what I’ve thought was a good choice of photo wasn’t. There are always better choices, but you can’t second guess yourself and wait until you find that perfect photo. If you do, you’ll be waiting a long time.
Finding photos
The Web is, obviously, a great place for that. You can find some excellent sources of no-cost stock photos, as well as royalty-free photos that you have to pay a couple of dollars for.
My favourite free stock photo sites are stock.xchng, morguefile, and image*after. Among them, I can usually dig up the photo that I need.
When I come up empty at those sites, I turn to pay sites like Dreamstime, StockXpert, or iStockPhoto. As I mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago, the photos at these sites are very affordable and you can download them in multiple sizes. Obviously, the larger the photo the more it costs. I’ve noticed the same photo showing up on all three of the pay sites that I use, and it being cheaper at one site.
Note: The stock photo sites I’ve mentioned are definitely not the only games on the Web. You can find a list of over 40 stock photo sites here.
A word of advice
Just as graphic design isn’t about putting graphics everywhere, you should be careful about adding stock photos to your written work. Don’t just add photos to a blog post or a report because you happen to have some nifty stock shots lying around. Make sure that the photos:
- Add something to the written words
- Have something to do with the text they’re connected to
Do you use stock photos with your written work? If so, how? And where do you get them? Feel free to leave a comment.
Photo credit: lusi at http://sxc.hu
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