Archive
Get ready for St. Patrick’s Day!
Just one of the 70 shamrock images available on Polylooks.co.uk
On Wednesday 17 March, it’ll be St. Patrick’s Day again. This often conjures up cliché images of shamrocks, over-sized Guinness promotional hats, red beards and leprechaun outfits. The original annual saint’s feast may have been overtaken by lively parties in many cities across the world, but this week and next many a blog and marketing ad will include the types of imagery you’d expect from St. Patrick’s Day. Whether you’re after a sensible image or something tongue-in-cheek for your St. Patrick’s Day marketing, this is where microstock photos come in handy.
Look and feel is everything when it comes to organising a party, and Polylooks allows you to surf for stock photos using the ‘emotion’ option. You can search for royalty free images conveying ‘happiness, luck’, ‘humour’ and ‘friendly’ to help narrow down your search to something of a party feel.
And, being St. Patrick’s Day, you won’t be forgetting the all important colour – green. On Polylooks you can also search by colour scheme, which includes both dark and light green, to give you the exact feel that you want.
Keywords are essential in narrowing down your search. In Polylooks’ online store of more than 500,000 stock photos and illustrations you can find 508 pictures of ‘Ireland’, 70 shamrocks, 295 references to ‘Irish’ and even eight leprechauns!
Whatever you’re doing for St. Patrick’s Day, Beannacht Lá Fhéile Pádraig from us and we hope you have a great time.
Brits bitten by travel bug?
One of the many travel-related images on Polylooks
Images of travel dominated the public’s online search for photos and illustrations during 2009 on the Polylooks.co.uk site, our research has found. Visitors to Polylooks were most likely to use “holiday”, “Europe”, “travel” and “vacation” as search words when looking to buy photos and illustrations on the site. Together, the number of word searches for “holiday” and “vacation” – more or less the same thing – amounted to more than four times the number of searches for “mountain”, the sixth most searched-for image on Polylooks.
Polylooks’ users in the main come from the creative industries – marketers, advertisers and publishers – hinting that “feel good” images were in demand during 2009, an otherwise bleak year for the UK economy, according to Polylooks’ Product Manager, Norbert Weber.
“The request for travel-related images is always high and customers want ‘fresh’ images. This could also be an indicator that confidence was returning to the travel industry during the year,” Weber said.
Other travel-related words featuring among the hundred most popular word searches entered by users on Polylooks during 2009 included “coast” (11th), “waves” (16th), “harbour” (26th) and “palm trees” (83rd). According to Google’s Insight tool, the four most popular destinations for online image searches in the UK over Google during 2009 were London, New York, Dubai and Blackpool.
Polylooks has close to half a million photos and illustrations in its library so the platform offers plenty of choice for image buyers to select from and you can also use our special filters to pick the right mood and colour scheme for your images.
Spring into Life: How to Photograph Spring
Springtime has always inspired creative people from Shakespeare, Blake and Wordsworth to Dickinson and Frost. The sights and smells of spring can convey incredibly positive vibes – the bleak monotone silhouettes of winter have passed and new buds come to life with the lengthening days.
Abundant blossoms and emerging flowers do not just attract insects, but photographers too. For photographers, spring provides a great opportunity to get creative and make the most of a wide natural pallet of colours and interesting light.
The Early Worm
Timing in spring is everything. The morning mists, frosts and dews can make some fantastically atmospheric shots. If you’re not a morning person then going out at dusk with a good exposure setting can also help create some fascinating sunsets and moonrises. A tripod is a must in this case.
While we’re talking about light, for the best effects how about back-lighting the flower you’re hoping to shoot with sunlight? That can give it a real ‘heavenly’ effect.
A Closer Look
Spring is full of small things, capturing these in isolation can make a really interesting portrait. Think about closing in on ‘delicate’ things, such as a dew drop or flower synonymous with the season. What about creating an ensemble to focus on, such as a bunch of daffodils against a plain white background for that true microstock effect?
The Bigger Picture
If you’re looking at making a bigger portrait, think about using nature to the max. Ploughed fields and rows of crops can make great shots. What about isolating a tractor or farmhouse? Think about a big, blue sky and contrasting it with the rich colour of the land; green leaves and woodland, or brown and red earth. Also, don’t leave your long lens behind to capture the abundance of wildlife on show.
If you’re a photographer, you’ll love the opportunities presented by spring and, from a microstock perspective, the great news is that people are looking to buy images of the nascent season for use in blogs, articles and promotional material.
If you’re looking to buy ready-made images of spring then Polylooks has more than 15,000 images related to spring in its extensive portfolio.
Romantic Vision: Black and White Tips
Just one of the romantic images in the Polylooks database
Valentine’s Day is not far away, prompting a rise in demand for romantic images to accompany articles, blogs and marketing materials. As well as red hearts and cupids, nothing captures the romance of Valentine’s Day like a black and white photo.
Despite its origins, black and white photography is rarer nowadays than the more commonplace colour image, making it more unique and, in the absence of colour, heightens the emotional context. That’s why so many wedding photos are still taken in black and white, even though colour photography has been widely available for decades. It adds an air of mystery and nostalgia.
Top Tips
Firstly, when shooting black and white photos, don’t set your camera to black and white if your camera gives you the option – shoot in colour on the RAW format and convert to black and white using a photo editing suite to avoid any potential loss of quality.
If you’re looking to capture romance in black and white, think about your composition. What do you want to use to illustrate romance? Is it couples? Rings? Hearts? If it’s a portrait, really narrow the field to focus the viewer’s eye on the core elements.
Contrast is an essential part of taking black and white images. When colour is taken out of the equation the focus shifts towards light intensity, so contrast really helps your image stand out.
The use of light is critical when shooting black and white. Romantic shots need to be sensual, not necessarily bright but, when using shadows, don’t make them too gloomy. That’s the challenge with black and white photography – finding the right balance – you don’t want a white out in the same way as you need to avoid overshadowing.
With black and white photography you can do so much more with texture than with colour, because the eye is forced to focus more keenly in the absence of colour. Play around with soft settings if you’re looking for that slushy feel!
Shopping for Images
If you’re looking to buy black and white images for Valentine’s Day, or any other event for that matter, make sure you log onto Polylooks.co.uk and use the colour and emotion filters available on the site to select the right look and feel for you. Also, use key search words such as ‘love’, ‘romance’ and ‘Valentine’s Day’ to ensure you get a wide choice of relevant stock images.
Then you can start looking forward to using microstock images in your features, blogs, or – if you purchase the merchandise license – to use commercially, such as creating gift cards.
Polylooks has nearly half a million images on offer so there’s plenty of choice!
Get Ready for the FIFA World Cup
Just one of many World Cup-themed images on Polylooks
This year sees one of the biggest events in the global sporting calendar – the FIFA World Cup in South Africa. The last World Cup, Germany 2006, saw an estimated cumulative television audience of 30 billion people world-wide and was attended by more than 18,000 media representatives. So this year publishers, bloggers and advertisers will be looking for football-related stock photo images to accompany their stories. Photographers – get your cameras out because image buyers will want soccer shots. Buyers – make sure you know about image rights!
Don’t Stray Offside
Images of real sportspeople can come with expensive copyright costs and restrictions, so generic football stock images and illustrations will be in demand, especially with the rise in bloggers and Web publishers since 2006. Around 900,000 blogs are posted in any given 24-hour period.
Though the event is a way off, creative agencies and sports-related professionals around the world will need photos for marketing materials imminently, so photographers are advised to start thinking about stock photography earlier rather than later.
But it is essential that bloggers, advertisers and publishers only use images which they have the right to use, according to online photo agency Polylooks. The company recently surveyed the UK’s creative industries – heavy users of images – and found that the vast majority were ignorant of stock photography image rights. Many are using images without consent and many don’t even feel guilty!
And when it comes to sports image rights and their value compared to standard stock images, users can end up in hot legal water.
Norbert Weber, Product Manager at Polylooks, advises: “There is still a great deal of confusion when it comes to using photos or illustrations that photographers and artists have made available for sale online. Many people who should be paying for the right to use images are not doing so due to a lack of understanding on industry rules and terminologies.”
Top Tips for Football Photos
Polylooks contains hundreds of football-related stock images, so users can be assured that they’re permitted to use those images without infringing any copyright and attracting the attention of photo agency lawyers. These stock images include players, fans, stadia, officials and other peripheral elements of the “Beautiful Game”. Polylooks’ intuitive filters also ensure that image users can select football stock photos by colour scheme and emotion, and it promises to be a colourful tournament!
UK Marketers Confess to Microstock Image Misuse
Microstock sites like Polylooks offer thousands of images for sale
This week, Polylooks unveiled findings of its study into the UK’s creative industry’s collective understanding of how they can use photos from the Web – and it makes worrying reading! We found that more than a third of UK creative professionals – publishers, PR people, marketers, etc – use Internet images without consent – and four in five (81 per cent) of those don’t feel guilty about doing so.
Digital rights are a really hot topic right now, and when a photographer or artist submits their work to a microstock site for people to use online they do so to either earn money, to showcase their work, or both. This is being undermined largely by a widespread misunderstanding over how and where images can – or can’t – be used. For example, only 21 per cent correctly identified the definition of ‘royalty free’, with nearly half (44 per cent) believing it meant they could use the image without paying for it. In fact, users must purchase the image and then are able to use it with certain restrictions. Additionally, only 16.5 per cent knew what ‘rights managed’ meant. The survey unveiled that these creative professionals have control over image-buying budgets, despite their lack of knowledge of how to legally use them.
Norbert Weber, Product Manager at Polylooks, said of the findings: “There is still a great deal of confusion when it comes to using photos or illustrations that photographers and artists have made available for sale online. Many people who should be paying for the right to use images are not doing so due to a lack of understanding on industry rules and terminologies. Some 85 per cent of creative professionals are not familiar with the term ‘microstock’, which presents stock image providers like Polylooks with a challenge. Is it time we redefined what we offer?”
Other key findings from the survey include:
· 81.4 per cent of creative professionals that have used an image without paying for it did not feel guilty
· 44 per cent legally download between one and five pictures each month, while seven per cent buy more than 11 stock images each month
· Nearly half (48 per cent) do not have a microstock image budget but five per cent spend in excess of £100 each month on images
Do you use microstock sites? Do these findings surprise you? Get involved in the debate, we’d love to hear your views.
*Survey of 200+ UK-based marketing, PR and publishing professionals conducted online throughout November 2009
Polylooks Announces Digital Rights Survey Winner
We recently ran a competition via our blog and Twitter offering the chance to win two return tickets to Paris on the Eurostar to people in the creative industries who filled in our digital image rights survey. We received more than 200 responses which produced excellent data. But there can only be one lucky winner and we’re delighted to announce that it’s Andrew Ashworth, marketing director of Cambridge-based design and marketing agency, Adrenaline Creative!
Andrew said: “Paris is one of my favourite cities so any excuse to go has to be snapped up. I am really excited that I have won the trip and intend to do the self-indulgent stuff that I wouldn’t do with my young children in tow – i.e. spend lots of time in art galleries and bars, and stay out late! Thanks to all at Polylooks.”
Polylooks would like to thank everyone that took part in the survey. We’ve got some really interesting insight which we’ll be unveiling soon on the very important matter of how UK creatives use – and abuse – images from the Internet, so watch this space!
Bonne vacance, Andrew!
Golden Brown: Capturing Autumn’s Glory
“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun,” – this is how the poet John Keats captured autumn in words. With golden leaves, ripened fruit and long shadows, autumn is also a fantastic season to capture on camera. Added to this we have colourful events, like Halloween and Guy Faulkes’ Night.
At this time of year publishers want pictures of autumnal scenes; yellow leaves, lingering sunsets, illuminated pumpkins. Polylooks has an extensive store of images for publishers to find their ideal shot to best encapsulate the season of autumn in all its glory. Have a search through www.polylooks.co.uk to find your perfect image. On Polylooks you can also search by colour scheme and emotion, which helps you slender down your options.
If you’re a professional or keen amateur photographer, you’ll already know how great autumn looks through a lens. Why not submit your pictures to Polylooks? There are three main types that really grab publishers’ attention:
An Autumnal Landscape
Landscape: The ghostly mists and playful colours of autumn make a forest or parkland scene perfect for publishers. Pick a clear day to get an atmospheric shot.
![Polylooks_608459[1]](http://polylooks.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/polylooks_6084591.jpg?w=228&h=152 "Polylooks_608459[1]")
A Seasonal Portrait Shot
Composition: Autumn is synonymous with the richness of harvest: apples, pears, nuts. Creating a composition of the
A Composition
season’s bounty could make an attractive photo for potential buyers.
We hope you enjoy autumn. Whether you’re searching for images for publishing and merchandise use, or a photographer thinking of getting into microstock photography, visit Polylooks.co.uk and see what we have on offer.
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