How to find good stock photos
The cat’s tip about the lightbox has saved me a lot of time. Both iStockPhoto and Fotolia give you online lightboxes. When I’m looking for one type of photo and other pictures catch my eye, I stash them in a lightbox and so I can find them easily later. You never know when you’re going to need a garden gnome or UFO.
on October 30th, 2007 at 7:52 pm
Another good post. Just a few years ago, I was sitting at my desk going through thousands of images on CD…fortunately I had a speedy 266 MHz pentium II with MMX technology:)
on November 9th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
I recently discovered that I like using the people/figures as characters in stories or plays. I’ll develop a narrative and write a story around them, put the ‘players’ in sequenced Powerpoint slides. Import the slides into Captivate as Jpegs and then record audio to the slides. It’s a cheap but easy way of doing an audio-enabled slide/movie. I suppose you could insert threaded multiple choice and make a “Choose Your Own Adventure.”
on November 10th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
Natalie, thanks for your comment. I like your idea for developing a photo-story in Captivate. I take a similar approach with Flash scenarios and comics and find I sometimes have to alter the plot or dialog to match the available stock photos. It can be a fun challenge.
on November 28th, 2007 at 3:57 pm
Another angle, especially for concepts and abstractions, is to find a visually related set of images (a bunch of antique tools from the same photographer, say, or carnival pictures taken by different people) and deliberately limit yourself to that set.
Don’t drive yourself crazy trying to figure out leadership is like a cotton-candy machine. On the other hand, I think these restricted choices help you escape from ladders, arrows, and otherwise inescapable sports analogies.
on June 16th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
[...] fall I did a quick overview of how to find good stock photos. Here are more in-depth tips that will help you use stock photos to reach your learners’ [...]
on March 11th, 2009 at 8:11 am
Cathy: how do you do the cool cartoon captions/thought bubbles in your photos?
on March 12th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Farmer Brown: I get the cartoon effects using ComicLife, which I think is available for both Mac and PC now (I use it on a Mac).
on June 30th, 2009 at 4:27 am
[...] Comment on How to find good stock photos by John [...]