Sorry Marketers, Getty Images Didn’t Just Make Your Year

Are you thrilled with the news that Getty Images is making 35 million images available for use for FREE for blogs and social media?

If you’re like me, your jaw hit the floor when you saw that headline. But hopefully you’re also like me and you then read the actual article. Sorry marketers, you don’t now have free run of the Getty Images library (35 million of its 60 million images were made available in the move).

The Getty Images library is available for blogs and social media in non-commercial use only through Getty’s embed feature, which includes a link back to the Getty Images site. (Apparently this guy didn’t read the fine print. Uh oh.)

Getty likely realized that they’re losing the battle to stop small fries from using their images, so they may as well get branding and link juice from it and stop fighting an impossible battle.

Commercial users – that’s all of you using images on websites, blogs, and social media for business purposes – must still be vigilant about making sure you have the rights to your images! (If I’m Getty, I had a team of image searchers ready to pounce on businesses poaching their images in the days following the announcement.)

There’s going to be a lot of confusion in the weeks ahead as people mis-interpret the change. At least one other blogger believes that your marketing blog on your business page counts as a noncommercial use. Sorry, having dealt with Getty once before, they don’t see it that way.

If the purpose of your blog is to promote your service, product, or advertise. Getty uses that to catch nearly anyone whose blog is attached to a business website. If you’re in the ecommerce business, don’t even try it.

Beyond Stock Imagery

This isn’t all bad news for marketers, because let’s be honest – stock imagery usually stinks. I’m not talking about the iconic images in Getty’s catalog, I’m talking about the rest of them. We can all spot it, and we all hate to use it (aside from the fact that it saves us time and sometimes money).

Who isn’t jealous of companies, organizations, and personality brands with the budget to get awesome photos for even the most minuscule of marketing efforts?

Vin Reed, a visual designer and photographer in Chicago, shared some great thoughts about stock imagery at a Think ‘N Drink session hosted by Astek Web last fall. Photography is often just filler for a content block, and for that stock imagery is fine, he explained. But if you want to make an impact, don’t fool yourself, you need the real thing.

“With stock photos there’s really nothing authentic whatsoever,” he said. “If you’re going to say 1,000 words you need reality. There’s a place for [stock imagery], and I use it all the time, but if you want to make an impact, you need to have a real photo.”

Reed suggests you ask a critical question every time you’re about to use stock images.

“Do we really want to risk using an image our competition is using?” he asks.

Plus, stock photography can be a management nightmare. Licenses don’t last forever, and keeping track of which photos are stock and which are original is painstaking.

The New World Of Marketing Photography

Fortunately, we can all pass ourselves off as a semi-competent photographers with today’s technology.

The smartphone put a great camera in everyone’s pocket, all the time. Apps give us easy-to-use filters and cropping tools to cover up our lack of a discerning eye for a scene or skill with settings.

To see just how much the simplicity of Instagram can do, check out the following two photos of the Michael Jordan statue in front of Chicago’s United Center. I run by it all the time, and always take a pic. Most aren’t good. (All photos in this blog are my own, for better or worse.)

Original Photo

Through an Instagram Filter

Photoshop and other powerful editing tools have made post-production an art form that makes previously unusable photos into marketing and storytelling material.

Pros lament all of this, but it has made the best photographers have to be even better. They capture scenes the average person doesn’t see, in a style we would never think of.

But what about us average Joe’s? How do we stand out, and how can we take photos that make an impact in our digital marketing campaigns?

4 Steps To Better Digital Photos

1. Shoot great content

All digital photos are not created equal. As Reed says, “The content in the photo needs to speak louder than the treatment of the photo.”

That means that you must have great subject matter. If you’re gathering photos at a company event or a conference, don’t try to capture the whole scene, because you can’t. Find faces, conversations, moments. Those will be more powerful than a room full of people seated at tables or mingling with cocktails.

2. Move closer

Sure, maybe you have a great camera and a powerful zoom lens, but most of us are using our phones. Zooming in with a phone isn’t going to help your shot, so Reed’s advice is, “when you’re ready to take your photo, take two steps forward and take it again.”

I love taking pictures of Chicago’s crumbling infrastructure, but trying to capture the enormity of it is fruitless, as you can see here:

But moving closer, even if you don’t capture the entirety of the scene, allows you to get a more impactful glimpse of the scene.

*If you’re wondering how this image applies to marketing, imagine you’re in an organization fighting for investments in your neighborhood, or a construction firm. Which of these two images makes your case for investment better?

3. Make it asymmetrical

A photo with the subject matter centered is boring. Use the rule of thirds as your starting point, then don’t be afraid to bend it.

4. Find a simple background

Try to frame your shots so the background doesn’t distract from the focus of the photo. Avoid clutter or a tree branch that appears to grow from someone’s head.

My parents have an awesome garden, and I wanted a picture of them that captured it, so I tried getting them with the garden in the background. Didn’t do much, as you can see.

Then I moved closer and set them against the backdrop of the sky with a hint of the garden (sunflower plant, blue sky, and the tan of faces who weed and pick under the sun all day) to create a much more stunning image.

*(I also used an Instagram filter – I’m not very good without it.)

*My parents own a bed and breakfast and sell at local farmer’s markets. This image gives a great peek at the people behind the food. 

Image overload?

And a final point from Reed on the idea that, with so many images being taken and published on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram every day people will suffer from image overload.

“That won’t happen,” he says. “Of all the t-shirts that have ever been made, I could still walk around this room and find a great t-shirt.”

And a lot of bad ones, so get out there and shoot a great photograph.

If you want to see more of me using Instagram to pretend I can take good pics, I’m at @mylespulse.