In part three of our series on blog photos, we explore some options for obtaining those perfect photos. There are two broad choices:

1. Take your own/hire a photographer
2. Find a picture online

Chances are you don’t have the time or the money for #1, so we’ll focus on #2.

Finding photos online requires an analysis of your budget. If you’d care to spend $3-$5 per post, there are a lot of professional-quality pictures available on sites like istockphoto.com. The downside of this is threefold: 1) it costs money; 2) most of the photos involving people are very obviously posed; and 3) it’s very easy to fall into the pattern of using the same photos as everyone else.

Business people shots are often the worst offenders on points 2 and 3. There’s one guy in particular – middle age, blue glasses – who seems to show up everywhere.

If stock photos aren’t the best solution, then, what is?

Everyone loves free photos, but the trick is to not steal them or use someone else’s stolen pics. Violating a license agreement, even if you don’t knowingly or intentionally do it, can lead to dire consequences.

A great tool that we found a few months ago steps around all of that. The site is compfight.com. It searches through all the pictures on Flickr.com by criteria that you specify. What we really like about Flickr is that it tends to have amateur, candid shots. These are usually not staged, and they don’t have the polished, plastic look that many pro shots have.

You can also narrow your search to photos that are licensed for commercial use under Creative Commons. This is great because you know you’re getting photos that won’t get you in trouble, as long as you follow the usage rules. This is usually simply that you must credit the photographer for the use of their image (hence the photo credit you see at the bottom of all our posts), and sometimes also that you do not alter the photo.

Once you have your basic look in mind, you just input your search term (“grease fire” for example) and restrict the license to Commercial, and you’re off to the races.

In part four next week, we’ll explore the tools you can use to crop and otherwise touch up your photos, if they need it.

Photo Credit: Micah Sittig via Compfight cc