Finding images to help tell a story (using Unsplash)
Using brand accounts to help find image series and avoid mismatched visuals
After dropping an unnatural amount of time browsing Unsplash for the perfect photo, i’ve begun to notice the advantages of using brand accounts over the accounts from individual photographers. Let me illustrate the point with a reoccurring use case…
- You fire up Unsplash and search for a hero image to use for a landing page.
- Eventually you find the perfect image and you’re pretty happy with yourself.
- Realising you’ll need more images for the features section you fire up Unsplash again.
- You find great images, except this time, you’re not so happy with yourself. Why?
After all the searching, it’s become obvious that the banner and feature images are completely jarring once side by side. What’s more, the imagery has become more of a distraction to your story than a support.
The value in a photo series
What i’ve come to value more than a great photo, is a series of photos that work together. Usually this’ll mean a collection of photos with interchanging subject matter whilst maintaining a common thread through its remaining attributes.
Physically speaking, it means all the photos are coming from the same:
- Photographer
- Lens
- In-camera settings
- Style/Post processing
- Lighting
Here’s the top three image results for “flowers” when searched via Unsplash. By many metrics, they should be the best picks. Maybe by themselves e.g. in the context of screen savers, they are the best. However together, there’s no harmony between them, causing a bit of tension. It’s not obvious why they are here, what they have to do with each other and how I should feel about them.
On the other hand, if we look at this much less known series from NordWood — a company specialising in wordpress themes—we start to look at something that carries much more. The value here is that I (a user) can take a pretty good stab at what i’m looking at before reading or looking at anything else. It could be talking about the services of a florist, representing mental health issues, or serving as inspiration for living spaces. Their presence is validated because they’re establishing continuity and context to your story.
The value of brand accounts
To be honest, everything mentioned here so far could be found using images from individual photographers, right? Well yeah, a lot of time that’s true, but there’s a couple of things i’ve noticed about brand account that seem to give them an upper hand.
More images from the same shoot
I’m not sure what it is, maybe individuals wanting to put their best foot forward or some other incentive to not post as much, but uploads from brand accounts seem to have more content from the same sitting which obviously helps when you’re wanting to invoke and maintain the same response from your audience in all your communications.
Less stylised
Often times, uploads from photographers carry their unique post processing style. These usually look great on their own, but can be distracting. In contrast, it would appear that most of these brands giving content away for free realise as much and go to an effort of making their uploads as versatile as possible.
Better suited for commercial use
If brands aren’t giving away content explicitly as freebies, then it’d seem that they’re giving away content after they’ve used them in their own shoots. Great, thanks for sharing, i’ll leave a like and attribute! Because the photographer already is mindful that these images will be used for brand collateral, they’ll often compose the shots just right, leaving plenty of white space in there.
They have bigger budgets
I suppose one of the reasons nature and street photography are so prevalent (besides from being beautiful) is that it doesn’t cost a whole lot of money to go out there and get a cracking shot. Not everyone is going to set up studio lights, pay models, put together sets just to upload the results for free. However, if there’s a greater purpose, like mentioned in the above two points, then Brands might have good reason to drop some extra dosh into the exercise.
And another thing!
There are a tonne of brands that are not exactly uploading any photos but have obviously done a lot of heavy lifting in creating collections. Like this, this and this but let me leave you with this gold nugget in particular.
The people behind this italian account are either completely obsessed about categorising images or it’s some bot. Yeah, it’s probably a bot. At any rate, in it you’ll find every possible type of collection imaginable with a non-trivial amount of photos in each.
Take a look yourself and enjoy :)
More Please!
Here’s to seeing more great brand content in the future.
p.s. i’d be silly not to call out my own recently launched Unsplash account so, here you go. These ones + more are on me 🎁
