How To Attract An Audience With The Best Blog Photography Tips (+128 Free Images)
![blog photography tips](https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/Blog_Ashton_BlogPhotographyTips_Header1-770x300.png?w=3840&q=75)
How To Attract An Audience With The Best #Blog #Photography Tips (+128 Free Images)
Click To TweetWhat Makes A Good Blog Photo Anyway?
There are five elements that appear consistently in expert's descriptions of a great photo: the rule of thirds, focal point, color, light quality, and overall composition. This list of photography technical goals doesn’t include the one main element that rules them all, but we’ll look at that a bit later.1. Start with the rule of thirds.
One of the best blog photography tips I could give you is the rule of thirds. The rule is essentially splitting the image into three parts going vertically, and then three parts horizontally, making a nine-section grid.![blog photography tips](https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/Blog_Ashton_BlogPhotographyTips_Thirds1-770x514.png?w=3840&q=75)
2. Choose a focal point.
Everyone loves being the center of attention! Okay, maybe not (especially if you’re like me), but decide which subject or area of the photo you’d like to draw your audience to first. That is the focal point. As Ken Rockwell says, "Anything that isn't directly helping the composition takes away from it.”![blog photography tips](https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/Blog_Ashton_BlogPhotographyTips_Focus1-770x514.png?w=3840&q=75)
3. Control the color.
Did you know that certain colors stand out more than others? Believe it or not, there are colors that appear to be closer to you simply by their color quality, while others diminish even though they’re the same distance away. Warm colors such as red, orange, and yellow appear to stand out and move forward. The human eye is naturally drawn to them first while cooler colors on the other hand,—like green, blue, and violet—recede into the distance. In order to use this to your advantage, take a look at the colors in your photo and strategically move things around until it appears correctly.![blog photography tips](https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/Blog_Ashton_BlogPhotographyTips_Color1-748x1024.png?w=3840&q=75)
4. Learn to love natural light.
There’s nothing more that a photographer loves than natural light. Why? Because photography literally means ‘drawing the light’ from the original Greek word ‘photos’ meaning ‘light’ and ‘graphe’ meaning ‘drawing.’ The shutter of a camera flashes a moment of light, thus creating the photo—which means everything in the camera is controlled by your light source. While flashes and studio light can be another great way to do photography, their brightness qualities may all differ, making it hard to capture the same even quality of light that natural light allows. The easiest place to find natural light is in or nearby a window. You can have the window completely open, or you can put a sheet over it that acts as a diffuser. Window light is a great spot to start taking photos.![blog photography tips](https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/Blog_Ashton_BlogPhotographyTips_Light-770x514.png?w=3840&q=75)
5. Just be real.
The main reason stock photography gets such a bad rap is because it looks fake. You can just tell. There’s something about it that’s completely unrealistic whether that’s a group of five perfect-looking people laughing around a single laptop, or that random object against a completely white, flat background. No matter what it may be, our eye almost immediately knows that the image isn’t portraying a real moment in life.![blog photography tips](https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/Blog_Ashton_BlogPhotographyTips_Real-770x518.png?w=3840&q=75)
Emotional Psychology Of Photos
The most famous photos of all time may happen to be technically accurate, but that’s not why people remember them. They remember them because of the emotional appeal that resonated beyond any words or logic. Take this image for example:![Alfred Eisenstaedt of Life Magazine's kissing photo](https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/OBITEISE_JPG-31395-4792.jpg?w=3840&q=75)
…And that’s what we want, right? To inspire action.“The uniqueness of a photograph can evoke feelings, such as anxiety, fear, familiarity, comfort or reverence depending on the subject and object matter. Photography can have the effect of reflecting the soul and thoughts of the person photographing and photographed,” according to THEME. It’s a combined emotional art as both the photographer and subject can produce something that strangers can feel and experience themselves—how powerful. Jonathan Klein even emphasizes the viewer’s role even more when he says, “We bring to each photo, our morals, our own values, and that’s what makes it resonate.” So how can we combine both the technical factors and powerful emotional appeal to make blog photography that will seriously resonate?
How To Use Photography To Connect With Your Audience
It’s quite simple really. Take all of the pieces discussed above and combine them into one amazing experience for your audience. Find what works best, and then continue to test and share your images.- Start with your audience: Who are they? What do they do? Where will they be?
- Choose an emotion: What emotion will resonate with them where they are at?
- Find an image that portrays that emotion: Use some of the great resources out there!
- Evaluate its quality: Does it follow the rule of thirds? Does it have a focal point? Does it look real?
- Schedule it: Using the best times to post, share your message and photo with your audience.
- Evaluate: Did it work? Was the message consistent with the emotion of the image?
- Try again: Practice makes perfect. Explore different types of images to find what works best.
Bonus: The Best Free Photography Websites (Well, And Some You Have To Pay For)
At CoSchedule, we do a lot of our own photography as we’ve found that to be the best for our audience, but sometimes it’s hard to capture an image exactly how you’d like. There are a million resources out there, but finding quality, unique, free stock photos can be hard. Here are my absolute favorite photography sites:1. Stocksnap.io
Just sign up for a free account, and you’re ready to start! New images are submitted all the time, so you can search by newest, most popular, or by category. Plus, all photos on StockSnap fall under the Creative Commons CC0 license. That means you can copy, modify, distribute any photo on the site, even for commercial purposes, all without asking for permission! I personally check it every other day and add photos to my favorites list so that when I need an image, I can check all in one place.![Screenshot 2015-10-22 15.56.29](https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/Screenshot-2015-10-22-15.56.29-770x394.png?w=3840&q=75)
2. Death To Stock
This company does just that, destroys the fakeness of the stock photography world, with real-life, beautiful images. While their premium account is a paid plan (which is totally worth it!), they have a free monthly series that they email out. It’s always along a new theme, and the imagery is excellent.![Screenshot 2015-10-22 15.57.32](https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/Screenshot-2015-10-22-15.57.32-770x362.png?w=3840&q=75)
3. Unsplash
Made by a company called Crew, Unsplash is a place for “free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos.” Every 10 days, they add 10 photos that are absolutely stunning! While they usually don’t relate to each other, the ten images offer variety both in appearance and emotion, which is great for application. Check em’ out!![Screenshot 2015-10-22 15.58.22](https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/Screenshot-2015-10-22-15.58.22-770x389.png?w=3840&q=75)
4. Twenty20
Twenty20 is a new paid resource that I’ve found that's definitely a great resource when it comes to quality and unique imagery. You can either sign up for a subscription or pay per photo, whichever works for you. They offer a large variety of images, and also include curated collections so that you can tell a story with the same visual tone. I will say, the one thing to watch out for, is each photo’s individual license. Not all of them have the same permissions, so be careful when selecting your image.![Screenshot 2015-10-22 15.59.54](https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/Screenshot-2015-10-22-15.59.54-770x409.png?w=3840&q=75)
5. Stocksy
With their beautiful interface similar to that of Pinterest, Stocksy provides genuine, real-life imagery that is both technically accurate and emotionally appealing. They, too, have a large variety to choose from, so finding an image shouldn’t be a problem. However, just like Twenty20, this is a paid service. You can either pay per photo or get a subscription, so make sure it's right for you before purchasing. Otherwise, their imagery is great and will surely convey the emotions you’re looking for!![Screenshot 2015-10-22 15.59.12](https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/Screenshot-2015-10-22-15.59.12-770x399.png?w=3840&q=75)