Even the most well written of articles can be enhanced by a photograph or illustration. Unfortunately, not every good writer is also a good photographer and even if he or she were, perhaps there is no time or opportunity to set up the perfect shot. It can be costly to purchase the copyright for a photograph from a stock collection and even more expensive to commission a photographer to capture that ideal image.

So where to find good quality photography to use on school projects, company literature of commercial work?

One good resource is Flickr. Used by over 5 million budding and professional photographers as an online photo repository, it stores over 3.6 billion images. Many of these pictures are available for use under a Creative Commons license. While this means the pictures may be used free of charge, attention must be paid to the type of license which covers each image.

Creative Commons Licenses

• Attribution - you can use this photograph as is or add new elements to it to create a derivative work as long as the photographer receives credit for his work. As an example, imagine an original photograph of New York city to which you have applied a charcoal drawing filter in Photoshop and added lettering to the graphic which says, 'Welcome to the Big Apple'. This is a derivitive work and the photographer must be credited for the photograph.
• Attribution-NoDerivs - you can use this photograph as long as the photographer receives credit but you cannot make any changes to it nor use it as an element of a newderivitive work.
• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs - This photgrpah can only be used non-commercially and in its original state, and the photgrapher must be credited.
• Attribution-NonCommercial - This work must be credited and cannot be used commercially.
• Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike - Ths work must be credited, cannot be used commercially an must carry an identical license.
• Attribution-ShareAlike  - This work must be attributed and must carry an identical license.

Generally speaking you will want to find photographs which are offered with an Attribution license. This allows both commercial use and derivative work to be made from the original shot.

Go Get a Big Dog!

Supposing you have just written an article about the importance of obedience training for dogs and your article comments on how this is especially true in the case of the giant dog breeds. A photograph of a big dog would set the article off beautifully but you have no pictures of your own that would do the job. How would you go about finding a big dog photograph with a Creative Commons license on Flickr?

There is a search box on the top right of the Flickr homepage. This will give you thousands of options of whatever query you type in but they are not filtered in any way. Instead of searching here, click on the blue search button. You will land on the main Flickr search page, but again, you need to filter your results to show only those pictures which carry the appropriate usage license.  Instead of typing a query, click through on the Advanced Search text link.

This long page  gives you many search options, including search by content type, by media or by date. 

You can type your search query in to the field at the top. In this case, the query reads big dog and the drop down query match option reads, 'The exact phrase'.

  Scroll on down to the bottom of this page and find the Creative Commons section. Notice that both the first and section options have been selected which will bring up photographs that are free to use with attribution and which can be used on commercial projects. If you wish to use the photograph as one element of a new graphic then go on and select the third option as well.  

The search results page clearly indicates that the photographs that are being shown are Creative Commons-licensed for commercial use. (Highlighted in yellow).

Because the search was narrowed to 'big dog', there are only 418 choices today. Had the query been simply 'dog', there would have been just shy of 200,000 choices to wade through.

  Having browsed through the photogrpahs and found one that will suit the article, click it to enlarge the picture and have it open in its wn page. From there click on the 'sizes' icon. Choose the size you need and click download which will save the picture to your own computer. From there it can be uploaded to the server that hosts your blog, your website or your on-line article.

In far less time than it took to read this article, you would have been able to find this wonderful shot of a young Great Dane.

Meet Doc Holliday, beautifully photographed by Savannah Bouziden. With his wonky ears and sincere expression, he would be an endearing addition to any article on big dogs and you would have to agree that though the picture has been sourced completely free of charge, there has been no sacrifice of quality and the photographer more than deserves full credit for a beautiful shot.