 We're at a bird camp here, and we're going to get started now. We're going to talk about strategies for better photos on your website, and if you're into video 2, improving your photography will improve your videos as well. So it's kind of a twofer. So let's get going. Does anybody know who this is? Recognize this man's face? Is this anyone's dad? Maybe you recognize what he said. I know it when I see it. We've heard that before, right? What was he talking about? Pornography. That's right. He was. There was an obscenity case in Ohio, and in his concurring opinion that actually the French film was not obscene, he said basically, I know hardcore pornography when I see it, and this is not it. And what's interesting is, great photography is not pornography. It's not, but people will give this answer when you ask them what makes a great photo. But it's not the same thing. It's not, I know it when I see it, great photography is not magic. It's not some luck. There are really clear components. So I often hear beginning photography students say this, and I certainly hear other people say it, who are choosing pictures to go on a website. And a lot of people who end up in charge of a website and putting photos on a website don't necessarily have any training in photography. Often we come from a writing background or we started a business, or for some other reason we find ourselves in charge of a website and we're just supposed to know what's a great photo. And I think that's not always the case. So today I'm going to make sure you walk out of here and you understand what are the characteristics that make a great photo. I'm going to make sure you understand how users interact online with photography. We're going to talk about what's a great photo for your website, which is a little bit different than just a great photo. And I've tried to put in examples of photos actually on websites as much as I can so you can see stuff in context. And then we're going to talk a little bit about where do you get great photos. So those are things for today. I hope you will interrupt me at any time with questions. It's more important to me that you get your questions answered than I get through all my slides. My slides are up on my website. I will be sure to tweet them out later. If you want to share, you'll be able to look at them again. I'm going to tell you a little bit about me just so you know who's talking. These are some things I do. I'm a content strategist. I deal a lot with content. I was training photo journalism. I've done a lot of writing. And I'm very concerned also with how users experience websites. So there are some things I love there. I love WordPress. I love being a part of this community that's so giving and fun. And I hate carousels and sliders. I want to hear why I hate that later. And I hope you walk out of here hating them too. Honestly. If you're a designer, I want you to stop making themes with carousels, please. But first let's just think for a minute about what makes a great photo. I think it starts with a moment, a special moment. And here, this was a very special moment. I'm guessing some of you may have watched this basketball game. Georgia State overcame Baylor and it was quite dramatic finish. I was teary and I didn't even watch Georgia State before and I was feeling teary at the end. And you know, here the players are celebrating in a special moment. The coach fell off the stool. That was another kind of exciting moment. And so often a good photograph or a great photograph has a very special moment. Weddings have lots of special moments, right? So this is an unfortunate moment at a wedding that I'm sure they were just so upset happened but they'll probably look back in 20 years and really love that this picture was taken. The cake and the cake fell off. But it's a moment and that's what makes it a great photo that was going around on the internet, right? Sometimes the moment is in a performance, right? Here we have a conductor getting, like, pay attention to him. He's got a moment here. And sometimes the moments aren't quite as exciting as that. Sometimes it's in a speech. So this is Matt Mullenweg who founded WordPress. If you don't know, so yay. And so the moment in a speech is the gesture. It's, like, the big smile or that sort of thing. So, you know, if you open up the New York Times or you hit it online and the President has given a speech, they'll often, he'll be doing something because that's the most exciting thing that happens sometimes in a speech. It could be a handshake. It could be a hug. But a moment is usually what photographers are looking for when they're shooting. So that's one component of a great photo. The next one. What do you think it is? Looking at this picture, what's nice about this picture? Reflection, the light. Okay, so what makes this picture special is light. So this is the Monterey Bay Aquarium. So you might think if you hit the site, you'd see maybe some jellyfish floating around or something like that. But they actually have chosen to put this quite beautiful picture. And it's nice because of the light. It's not flat. It's not gray. It makes it interesting because of the light. This is a picture of a monk meditating at a wall. It could be super boring. But because of the light, it makes it really interesting. This is from Duke Photography. This is a photo on campus from a university. It's at a library. Without these light forms, this would be a lot less interesting. And what the photographer did was she got set up. She figured out a time where the light was going to be good. And then she waited for somebody to ride through. So moment, light. And the third component of a great photo is emotion. So here we have some super excited soccer fans. I don't know if anybody likes soccer in here, but I really like watching the United States do well in soccer. And here we can see a lot of emotion on the faces of these soccer fans. Here we see emotion on the face of a boy who is playing violin for his teacher who was shot. This is a very sad situation. And the photo is not lovely in terms of color, but it displays emotion, which is what makes it a nice photo. And this is another wedding photo. And this really kind of captures, I think, all three of the things. It's a special moment. There seems to be emotion on both people. And there's some light coming in that's kind of hitting the face of the father. And so these are the three things. So if you think about, like, what's a great photo, or photos that you liked in the past, you can usually go, oh, it was this and this. It had at least two of these things. And the light at least wasn't terrible. The light can contribute. Sometimes the light actually makes the picture. So when you're thinking about shooting, these are the things you're going to try to capture. There's two other components to a great photo. This is from Robert Kappa. He's a photo journalist, very, very famous. Could be the most famous one. If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough. And when I've worked in bigger organizations, I've been a manager of the content managers of the different areas of the website, and I've sent them out to shoot photos. What I get are photos that are just not close enough. And you really want to get in there. When I'm shooting photos, like, if there's something on a stage, I'm, like, behind the bush, like, trying to shoot photos of the speaker. You really want to get close. So I'm going to give you an example. So this is a photo from the Full Frame Festival. It's a documentary festival. We have in Durham, North Carolina, where I'm from. It's a wonderful place to come. I was shooting photos, and I was told, make sure to get pictures of the people who have these priority badges on, because they're the VIPs, they're the sponsors. And this is a very, meh, photo. It's very, meh. It gets so much better when I get closer. So much better because there's a focal point. So the fourth thing is the focal point. You want to fill your screen. Look at the difference. Eh, much better. You want to fill the screen with a focal point. So the people who are looking at your pictures don't know what the focal point is unless you make it obvious. You know what you're shooting. And you might be like, no, I was trying to get the guy in the blue shirt. But you just want to make it clear as a day as to what they are supposed to be looking at, where their eyes should be. If, for example, you are a foodie and maybe you have, I don't know, cooking thing and you only cook with like grass-fed beef from cows, you know. If the thing is grass-fed, it's like, focus on the grass in the cow's mouth. You know, not the picture of the whole cow, like really focusing on what it's eating. So that's the fourth one, right? So focal point. We have moment, light, emotion, focal point. Your last thing is your background. Ideally, it's contributing to the picture. It's making it better. But at least it's not distracting, okay? So I'm going to trust that all of you know that we don't want a tree coming out of somebody's head or anything like that, right? I'm going to assume we're advanced enough to kind of know that, but we just need to be a little bit more discriminating. So this is a picture that was shot by the university photographers and when I was given this picture back, I wasn't there for the photo shoot. When I'm at the photo shoot, I act like a stylist where I'm moving things around. Like, if there's a trash can in your picture, move it. You know, if there's a bunch of clutter on a table, move the clutter. You know, you don't want to make it look fake, but you don't need to make it look like a mess either. So it's finding that nice in between. So I looked at this picture and I was like, who got shot in crime's office? Right? And yeah, and it was one of those things that if somebody had just kind of been there ahead of time, because the photographers sometimes they just come and we can talk a little bit more about this about hiring professional photographers. They need direction, right? They don't know everything and they don't know that they could just say, could we just take that down for a few minutes? Like, they didn't do that in this case and nobody was there to say, let's just take this down. So you can save this maybe in Photoshop, you know, you can make it kind of blue or that sort of thing. That's a better, but what would have been better would just be take it down for the shoot. So it's not distracting. It doesn't contribute to anything. Here's a picture I took of a different professor. This is from when I worked at Duke University. I was shooting a lot. And it's okay. You know, it's the moment. It's like the, he's talking in class and he's got his fingers out and he's got a pen. It's so much more rich when you've got the rest of the information though. So here we have a background and you've got some writing on here. So you can see, oh, he's talking about dividend policy, dividends and buyback. Okay, he's probably a finance professor or an econ professor, right? You can also get some information from even the foreground as well. You can see, oh, he's in a class. Oh, it's a full class. Oh, that person has a baseball cap on. This is probably undergraduates. You can get a lot more information. So you want your photos to just pack them full with information because we do know from research that viewers really like that. If I'm hemming and hawing about a picture, if I'm like, mmm, is it good enough for the website? I'm not sure. I'd reject it, you know? And I learned this as a photojournalist and being trained by photojournalists and having editors look at my work and be like, no, that's not good enough, you know? And you go, oh, I have to go back and shoot more. But it really does start to raise your standards. And so people sometimes tell me, well, what if I work in an organization and I send out somebody to shoot some photos and they come back and they aren't good enough? What I did was I would have like tiers. So I had like standards for different things. So the standard on the website was very high. The pictures needed to be very professional. And if it didn't match the quality, I just had to be like, mmm, sorry, it's not going to make the website. The next level was like social media because you can put things on Facebook that don't belong on your professional website. There's a little bit more, okay, maybe it's an event, maybe the pictures aren't fantastic, but it's important to show a window into the organization. So I would say, well, that's not good enough for our website. I probably wouldn't say good enough. I'd probably say, I think that's better for Facebook and it would go there. And other times I would just have to say, you know what, that would be really good on our internal blog. You know? And I would say, do you want to come to my photo lunch and learn next week? Something like that. So now you know the five things, okay? Can you repeat them back to me? What was the first one? Moment. Second one. Live. Yes. Emotion. Vocal point. Awesome. So I think you can walk out of here right now. Please don't. I have some more good stuff to tell you. But you could walk out of here right now and shoot better photos. It is not about the camera. I do think you can get really nice things with a good camera, but I know people who have very expensive cameras who shoot bad photos because you need to know these basic things. There's also a whole batch of professional photographers who shoot with the iPhone now. It's iPhoneography. And you can look at it online. You can see some of the beautiful pictures from an iPhone because they're following these rules of composition and some of these basic things they're looking for. Does anybody have any questions right now just about what I've talked about? So the question is, can you elaborate a little bit more on taking great photos with your phone? So I think with a phone, the great thing, so there's one thing that photographers always say and that the best camera is the one you have with you because that's the one that you'll have to catch the special moment. It's often about getting close. Getting close is a big thing. So you would want to keep it with you regularly. You would want to be shooting regularly and looking at them and seeing what worked, what didn't work, that sort of thing. Look at the people online, like Google iPhoneography and see how these people are making photos. Learn about the rule of thirds, which is a very basic composition rule that will improve your pictures. I mean, like, tonight, they'll improve your pictures just by understanding rule of thirds that will make your pictures more dynamic. And I'll give you some resources for further learning, too. So keep moving because sometimes we can't hire professional photographers, sometimes we have to do it ourselves and I understand that and we'll talk a little bit about that. But one thing I want to talk about next is how do we engage with photos online? How do people do it? What do we know from research? Not from, like, my opinion or anything like that, but this is based on research. So this is a heat map and in a heat map, there's some kind of device that's checking the eye fixations of somebody interacting with the screen. And when you see the red area, that means it's getting a lot of eye fixations. Yellow's a little less and green is a little bit less. And this is a case where it wasn't a website that was put up, it was just like a magazine spread. And they were saying, where do people look? And we do know from research, many different research studies that people tend to look at faces. They tend that way. So if you ever have the choice between a building and a face, put the face up, right? If you have to put the building, put a face with the building if you could. Faces tend to attract people. Is this an app? No, it's just a heat map that some researchers put on, they put a magazine spread on screens and then had a bunch of participants come in and look at it and just kind of studied where they looked. Yeah. There is an app called Crazy Egg that can show you where people are looking on a website. I believe they have a plug-in for WordPress. Tell me what you note about this picture. Speak louder, y'all. Stock photo. It's a stock photo. How do we know it's a stock photo? It's staged, right? It looks fake. Do your coworkers look like that? Mine don't. Okay. Who wears a white to the office? I don't know. But yeah, so this is a very staged photo. And what we know from research is that users ignore decorative filler photos like this. They ignore them because they know they're staged. So if you've been a big fan of stock photography, I hope it's coming down a few levels because there's times when you can use stock photography and we'll talk about what you could do with a stock photo but just chucking one up on your website. I heard somebody earlier today reference like throwing a photo up and I was like, oh, don't throw a photo up. You should never be throwing a photo up on your website. It needs to be thoughtfully planned, especially because we're in the world of mobile. And we'll go into that a little bit more. This is an example of a heat map. And this heat map is actually from, this is an organization called the GERD Institute. It's kind of a disorder disease some people have. And this is a heat map. So it's showing, wow, look at how far somebody will scroll down the page and how far people will read if you actually have your text broken up well, like writing for the web. But I'm not showing it to you for that. I'm showing it because look at how awesome the user is at avoiding the photo. Like they're like, I can see that that lady's not real. Like that is an actress with some groceries that have like the lettuce popping out. And they've just learned to ignore it. And so users do this now. And so when I come to a website, like this is the human rights campaign and I really like them. I think they do great work. But I come to this site and I'm like, oh, why is this a picture of someone's shoulder and the ribbon? You know, like you could have just stuck a little ribbon somewhere instead. You're taking up some good real estate there with this photo. And I started getting excited about this part that said get the facts at the bottom. I thought, ooh, an infographic. I like infographics. I'm going to check that out. I clicked on it and it didn't even go to an infographic. It was nowhere. And I just think this is a missed opportunity. It's kind of a wasted space to me. And on the phone, it really makes me sad, right? Filler photos make us sad on mobile because it slows down the connection and it takes a long time to load. And then I already have to scroll to get to the goods. You want to dump the filler photos as much as we can. Here's an option I've seen Duke do and I've seen some other people do it too where if you have a photo that you think might be ignored but it maybe conveys like a message you're trying to get out, you could put a fact on top of it. So that's one thing you could do with a stock photo. These are actually real photos but I think they thought these are going to be much stronger if we actually put some interesting facts on top. We do know that users like real photos. So here's an example from the United Way, a nonprofit. And this is a real photo. Now notice like they didn't just all happen to wear a Live United shirt that day, right? So there's some staging going on here. But these are real people. These are real kids. They're having fun. It looks like it's an after-school program and the photographer came and was like, how about we all put on these shirts or something like that? Or maybe it's a special day and they all got t-shirts. I don't know. So this kind of photo, we know from research users really engage with it and they want information-rich photos. I remember learning about bios on websites when you have a bio, so you have the text and you have a picture that the users will spend much more time with the picture even though it takes up a little part of the screen versus all the text. They'll spend way more time just looking at the person. So those pictures are important and it's important that they're professional. And if your LinkedIn photo is not professional, go get it professionally done, okay? LinkedIn is important. What we expect now to be able to see who is behind companies, who are the people, who are the humans running this show. And this is a bakery that's awesome in downtown Durham if you ever come visit. But what a missed opportunity on the About page. Very missed opportunity here. And what is interesting is, so there was some research out of the Pointer Institute, which is down, I believe it's out of Florida. They do a lot of research around news organizations and they did some stuff that just came out recently that they know about photography. How are they engaging with photos online? And they learned two main things. One thing is that users are really good at sorting out what's a professional photo and what's an amateur photo. Like they can see it very easily whether something's user generated or professional. And the other thing that the users kept saying that they wanted is I want pictures. I like pictures that show me something I can't see normally. So in the case of the bakery, show me what's going on in the back area. Like a flower or something. Show me something real that may be something that I wouldn't see. That's an opportunity there. So it's important that your photo, it could be a great photo, but if it doesn't fit the space well, it's not going to work so good. What do you guys think about this photo here? This is Whole Foods. It's a nice photo, not so great for that space. We got words on top of the kid, who's really cute. And this guy is looking off of the side of the screen. We don't want people to be looking off the side of the screen. Here we have it again. This is the business school. They have a building. It's pretty boring. But they have this picture of this woman who's also looking at my dock or off my screen. It's kind of directing me right off my computer. Even the White House. They're super media savvy. This is a video related thing, right? So when you have a video, you get to choose what your photo is, which is a cover photo, and YouTube might give you three choices, but if they're not good choices, which sometimes they're not, you need to upload a good photo. And in this case, the president is looking at the search bar, which doesn't make a lot of sense. I mean, it would make more sense for him to actually look at the title of his talk and not the search bar. And you may at this point think, like, Melissa, you're being really picky. This is really silly. So let me show you a couple more slides. So here's a heat map. Some researchers did this. They put this ad up on a screen, and everybody's looking at the baby's face. Like, oh, what a nice baby. Wonderful. Look at when the baby looks at the words. All of a sudden, they look at the baby and they look at the words, too. And I'm guessing that the advertisers want you to look at the words, right? Not just the baby. And I'm guessing that President Obama or if he could look at the play button, he'd look at the play button. So we often want to be directing people to our words, whatever words. It might be the buy now button. It might be the sign up button. I don't know what it is. Or the alternative is to have the subject all looking right out at you, right? And here we have an otter who's like, I'm an otter. I need your help. Help me save the Great Lakes, right? So there's an emotional connection going on there. So you need to be mindful where people are looking in your photos. And so sometimes that just means flipping the photo around. We're going to talk about carousels now. They're also called sliders. This is one on Marvel's site. I mean, they're all over the place, right? This is a place called Undercover. It's some kind of boutique. And we know that people ignore carousels. I mean, people ignore them or they are annoyed by them. I mean, like, you can give a user in a usability test, which is when you're asking them to do a task on your website. And the target for the test, it might be like, find the computer that's new. And it'll be in the banner. Like the first banner. And the user will fail the test because they'll just ignore it. They're just ignoring it. There's like blindness towards it. So if you're putting things in a banner, it's quite likely that users are not even seeing it or they're feeling annoyed by it or they just start to look at the banner. It moves and it frustrates them. So carousels, I really don't think they're the way to go. And we've known this since 2012. But people are still doing this and people still recommend them because they're a great solution when you have an organization and a lot of people want to be on the homepage and you're like, well, you can be on the homepage and you can be on the homepage and we'll all be on the homepage and we'll just be in a carousel and I tell you, user experience is a competitive advantage. User experience is where it is at. It is making your users have an awesome experience at your website. And one day it won't be a competitive advantage. One day, hopefully everybody's going to be really user friendly and that sort of thing, but right now it still is. So I'm just going to review some of the things we just went over. I think I forgot to mention that users do tend to prefer large photos to small photos but not necessarily hero image. We'll talk about that. But they do like studying real people, ignore stock, stage photos, like to look at the faces. They do not like carousels. Let's talk about what makes a great photo for your website. Again, it has to fit the space well. This is a UNC website. I don't know what's going with this background picture. I'm looking at some guy's butt in his backpack. Not so great. Someone else's arm. I don't think that's really great. I don't think it fits the space very well. I also don't like the picture that's kind of in the bottom of the group of students. You guys can probably hardly even tell what's going on there. I can't even tell what's going on there and I'm right near the screen because it's like 20 people crammed into a one inch space. It's not the right size for the space. Let's talk about hero images. So you may say, okay, I'll get rid of my carousel but I'll do a hero image. Well, this is not a great hero image. This is an example of a theme that was chosen and I bet I would bet money that the people at Penn State undergraduate admissions are like, oh no, what picture are we going to put in the carousel? How are we going to freshen up this picture? Because if you're going to have a hero image, it really needs to be awesome. And here we have this why Penn State, the person kind of looks confused who's getting asked that question. It's very mediocre. And you've taken up a lot of room for me to look at a mediocre picture when I'm probably trying to get information from something like that. If you're going to do a hero picture and hero image, it has to be awesome. It has to be so good. A hero image is like that big image, like what you see here. Like it's that boom. They call them hero images often. Yeah, no, great question. I mean, ask me anything because I don't want to make an assumption that y'all know something. Yeah. Which one, this one? The side share? Yeah, I'll make sure to tweet them out. I'll give you the address at the end. I promise you guys can definitely look at these. They'll be up forever. But I learned something when I was preparing for this talk. I learned that if you want, you can spend $59 to $79 and get your cat a hand-knit scarf at CatScarf. And this, this is a good hero image. This is the best hero image I've ever seen. Ever. It's showing the product. It kind of matches the cat's eyes. It's stunning. I would remove the copy. I would put a shop now button kind of on the kind of body part of the cat. I mean, this is awesome. So, you know, when you're trying to figure out what images to fill your front page of your website with, it needs to be up to like CatScarf quality. All right? You also have to be aware of this text overlay thing that happens a lot. This is a site with a carousel and that sort of thing. But maybe let's say you bought into it like a cat. Don't do carousels anymore. But I'm going to have some text explaining what's going on with the picture. And that's totally a legitimate thing to have, right? Picture some text next to it. But not over top of people's faces. This isn't a good structure. This isn't a good structure. These are from real websites. This one, you could just flip it around. The only time you can't flip a picture, right, is the background, right? Then you cannot flip it. Everything will look backwards and funny. But you really need to think about, so the best thing here, if you can plan ahead, if you know where your photos are going to go before you shoot them, or before you have professional photographers shoot them, you can make a request. You can say, I want you to leave extra space in the upper right corner because that's where the text is going to go. That's going to explain this picture. It's a lot easier than doing it in Photoshop. I promise. So this is an example that's much better. I think it's for the bicycles, Santa Cruz bicycles. It's really well placed. Here's the Susan G. Komen Foundation. I think this is pretty tricky, that kind of got it in between the two ladies. I think they probably did a little bit of Photoshop work to blur it out so you could see the words better. But they're being very strategic. They're not coming out faces, anything like that. So it makes it a lot harder because not only do you have to get a great photo, you've got to use those five components to get a great photo. You have to think about, okay, what do users want and what's going to fit with my website. And all of a sudden it's like, gosh, I picked a theme that made this really hard for me. So you need to think ahead. This is just a little recap. It's the right size. It fits the space well. Oh my gosh. What about three and four here? You've got to think about your audience needs and goals, right? So for me as a content strategist, the best content is it's in that space between what the user wants and what the business goals are, right there. That's the content you want. That's the text, that's the photos, that's the videos you want. And it has to reflect your chosen message. You know, what are we telling about ourselves? What are we talking about ourselves? Is it sending the right message? So let's go into where do we get great photos? So we're going to brainstorm for a minute here. Where would you go if you had to get a great photo? What would you do? So stock photos are one option, unless you've got a plan for how you're going to use it on your site. You would say, hire a photographer. You know, if you can afford it, I do recommend you hire a photographer. It is definitely, if you plan ahead about really what you want, you can get a lot out of one session. You can also go to Flickr Creative Commons. It is a place where you can get photos that are real. They require attribution. You could just add in Gimp and Photoshop. Somebody's name, that sort of thing, onto the photo. So that's another place. It's also sorting through a lot of junk, just to be honest. That's another way to do it. If you have a journalism school near you, you have a bunch of budding photographers in there. And really a lot of what I've shared with you today is really like photojournalism 101. So if you can get somebody who's been through a year of taking photography classes, they're going to shoot good. Like a lot of my friends who went to journalism school photographers now, wedding photographers, work for the New York Times, that sort of thing. And so, I mean, you could literally like figure out where do they take classes, put up a poster, will pay student with one year of experience in photojournalism to shoot photos for my business. It will be a lot cheaper than a professional photographer if you cannot afford one. So those are some options. There's another organization I've heard about called Shoot for Change, that will help shoot for nonprofits. I can't talk to the quality of that, but it looks like it's a way to connect, I just discovered it, it's a way to connect photographers with worthy organizations to get out your messages and that sort of thing. What about models? Well, I mean, certainly if you've ever been on Craigslist, it's very easy to like find a model who wants to get more things in her portfolio and have them do a trade with a photographer and that sort of thing. So sometimes models want to, and they don't want to be like high fashion models, which is attractive people, you might say, yeah, I may need somebody and if they want to beef up their portfolio a bit, photographers can help hook you up with that sort of thing too, because photographers are often connected to models. I think those are good questions and I'm not going to go into all of it, but what I can say is that it is just like a piece of research, something you own or that sort of thing. A photographer puts something online, that's like something they own. So you need to be mindful and if you want to use it, unless they've just said, hey, it's okay to just do attribution only, you need to pay them. It's a public event, you're right. I guess you're not going to sell any photos of me, right? Online? You're not going to do that, huh? Okay, so you're probably okay. So when we're sharing photos with our friends, when we're sharing photos with events and that sort of thing, it's not commercial use. So generally there's not a lot of pushback about it. There could be though. I would still retain rights to my photos because technically anybody needs to have a model release, right? For anybody you've taken a photo of. Now I will tell you that I will go to a conference and I will shoot photos of the events. I will write a blog post about the event and put the photos in there and the people are thrilled. You know, they're generally very happy, but they absolutely have the right to say, you can't do that. So some of it's common sense and if you're going to make money off of somebody else's image, that's a problem, right? But I've been surprised too though of how times when I've wanted to use a photo, I just figure out who the photographer is and I say, hey, can I use your photo? They might say yes if they want exposure or they might say, sure, pay me blank and I can say I can do that or I can't do that. But it is important not just to snag photos. Why would check with the bride, right? That's where you would just check with the people who are in it. You don't necessarily need to get them. It is and you could say I don't like that. Take that picture down. I think at events there are a couple places where there's fair use and then I'm just going to keep moving on to make sure we cover everything. But there are some fair use things. So things that are news can certainly be put online. It's considered news and it's protected on that. Educational things can generally people go, okay, that's fine. You use it for an educational purpose, that sort of thing. But it is good to be mindful of copyright stuff for sure. I just want to make sure we spend a couple moments talking about when we have to do it ourselves. Because sometimes we have to do it ourselves. And you might just say, you know what? Professional photographers are kind of expensive. I'm going to have to do this myself, at least until I make more money or that sort of thing. What do I do? Take a photo class. Take a live photo class. You could take a class that's two months long and you're going to be shooting better pictures of your family as well as for your business. It's going to be great. If you have a teenager and they have an interest in photography, great. Get them to do it and ask them to shoot photos for you. In terms of photography. Especially if you're like, I need to be really good at shooting jewelry. You can just learn how to do that. Or I have to be really good at shooting blank. It doesn't take too long to get decent at that. It helps a lot to view great photos and start to just keep raising your standards as to what a great photo is, right? Cat scarf. Great photo, right? New York Times has a lens blog. That's a good place to go looking at pictures and newspapers and magazines. There's five components we talked about. You can be like, oh yeah, there's the focal point. Oh yeah, the light's good, that sort of thing. Practice shooting yourself. You're not going to just learn by looking. So a lot of photographers get good by shooting really bad photos. It's very normal for a photographer to shoot a thousand photos and have one they're happy with. So often when I've sent content managers and people out to shoot events and that sort of thing, I'll see them. I can follow the trail and they're starting to shoot and they're getting closer and they're shooting, they're shooting and then they stopped and they went to something else to shoot and if they just stayed longer on that thing and kept shooting and working this group of people they were shooting, it would have been a lot better. So you have to keep at it and keep at it and shoot a lot of photos. There's a guy, Ben Long, who I love. I have no relation to him. I've never met him, but I love his classes on lynda.com and I love lynda.com. You can do a free trial, which is nice and you can just go to the parts of the classes you want. You can go to like a couple classes, five minutes on composition, five minutes on landscapes, five minutes on lighting. The classes are broken down, so that's a great thing. He also has a book that's super dense that if you prefer to read, then that's a way to go too. One thing I wanted to share is that a really bad recipe for photos is to try to host an event and shoot photos at the same time. Like you're having something happen and you're also trying to shoot some photos that you can put up on Facebook or your website or that sort of thing. And that's not a good plan. You want to designate somebody of like you're the person who takes photos and it may be your kid. It could be your high school kid. But it needs to be somebody who is not you because you will not end up with a good result. I can almost promise you that. Any questions right now? These are the sources. These are places I recommend you go. If you want to keep up with what's happening in the world of user experience and usability, if you want to know how people really use websites and how people engage with photos on websites as well as text and all kinds of other things, go to the Nielsen-Norman group E-Newsletter sign up for it. You'll get it once a week. It is a great resource and it's free. And you can learn how people really act on mobile. Usability is like gravity. It is like this force of like how people use websites. You need to know it so you can make better choices in terms of photos and writing and all kinds of things. If you aren't convinced about carousels please go to ShouldIUseAcarousel.com It'll make you laugh. It's a gentleman who made a carousel about why you shouldn't use carousels. And it's frustrating and annoying and you'll get it. So we have a little time for Q&A. Does anybody have anything? Depth of Field Depth of Field is really like what are you trying to focus on, right? So if you have a focal point and you don't care at all about what's in the background, you just want it to be on like the child's face or the gentleman, then you would have a really narrow depth of field, you know, maybe 2.8. It could be really tight just on the face. Headshots, professional shots, often you want them just looking at the face, not looking at the stuff behind. Now event photography is different. Event photography you might want them to be able to see what's going on in the environment as well. And so you have a greater depth of field making sure that everything is in focus. You could probably do that with some apps on your cell phone camera. You're going to be limited somewhat in terms of your camera. I think in your terms of your camera, what you're going to be focusing on is great composition, getting close enough and you can do some cool things with different kinds of it's kind of like techniques like vignetting and doing different kinds of kind of effects afterwards that can really make a photo look neat. I will say there could be an exception for a carousel on a photographer's site or a place where somebody expects to see a slide show. Now events I'm not sure, like maybe you don't lead with a carousel. I mean people really don't like them honestly. But you might lead with a picture but then there's a link to see a slide show of different events, you know, like and if you do have a carousel on your site right now which some of you may that's okay stop it from auto-rotating that is what you want to do tonight, when you go home stop it. Give the user control of when it moves okay and then start planning it's like okay what could I do instead of a carousel? It's better but they're still ignored. But at least you want to annoy your user like you want to annoy somebody by having it fly by but it's going to be ignored and so that picture on number three might never get seen. So I think you're just better off going with a static awesome image okay or going with an information graphic or an interesting quote or a fact. There's lots of different ways to engage with photos. I mean I was talking about this at a non-profit conference and this woman came up to me and she says I wanted to slap you when you said that about carousels and I was like what should I do instead? I was like well we had life before carousels you know, like there's lots of options say the last thing again that you were saying? Okay, so he's asking about what do you do when you hire a professional photographer and you were talking about like writing out a script or using stock photos or that sort of thing. So I've never actually used stock photography I've been able to just explain generally to photographers what I want but there's this assumption that when you hire a professional that like they just kind of can figure out what you want and instead it's really important to be very specific and if you're not sure that they're going to get what you're talking about you can pull up photos of photographer and say we want something that looks like this but real with our people in it, right? You could tell them first I want broad shots I want you to capture the whole scene then I want some medium shots then I want some really tight shots if you have a photographer coming you may as well get them to get a whole variety of shots and not get a whole bunch of shots that are just of medium depth so they need direction that sort of thing that you want to shoot in a certain style like everything I've shown you is really documentary style but you may notice if you look in magazines especially last year it was a big trend to have what's called a blown out background where things would be really white in some area and it would be like give this really hip cool look to the whole thing so I can remember I missed a photo shoot where I was when I was at Duke and the photographer came and she was like well I'm going to be creative and so instead of shooting like documentary style photography which was on the entire rest of the website she thought she like blew out the sky so it was all white and the trees were like this funky color of yellow and she was being really creative so you want to show examples of what you're looking for you know, you say this is the site it's going on it needs to match the feel of the site it needs to match the rest of the site yeah I mean you should it's their right so generally photographers who go out in the field even if they're shooting pictures of all kinds of people a release, a model release and you can just Google like model release form and do that especially if you're going to make money off your website or anything like that and it's not a news related site yeah, yeah well I think the newspaper would say you need to contact USA today honestly you know I mean those photographers are being paid back there, there's a couple back here I'll look at you yes yeah I mean it's a gray area I mean certainly they could say take that down and that's their right and that sort of thing but you may feel like wait a minute they're posting it online about our site I think it's okay you know like yeah I would just use some common sense in terms of that sort of thing I wouldn't be particularly stressed out about that especially if they're putting it out there on reviews of your site can I say anything nice about sliders I can say that they were an awesome solution in 2008 I mean seriously I totally remember being like this just solved my problem with all these different people in my organization I don't want to be on the home page we can all be on the home page so they were a really good solution back then but they're a problem from an accessibility perspective they can be problematic for screen readers they are ignored I think the only time you would use a slider was if someone would be going somewhere expecting a slide show which would probably be a photography website because you do need to see like you're expecting to see like a slide show I'm sorry yeah, yeah, yeah maybe you have your hero image or some other kind of image or thing at the top of your page at the bottom you have like see a slide show how we're transforming or that sort of thing it's all about the user and giving them control and that's the thing that everybody started bump up against sliders is when they were doing tests with them users were just ignoring them or getting annoyed by them so that's what you really want to avoid any other questions okay I have a challenge for you so now that you know the five inputs find a really great photo online take some time think about it beyond this session find a great photo email it to me email me the link not the photo, don't snag it just email me the link and say I think this photo is great because blank I'm gonna take all the emails of whoever sends this to me I'll throw them in a hat, I'll have my three year old pick one out and I'll hop on the phone with you for like a 30 minute consulting call about whatever you want to talk about it could be about photography, I deal with all kinds of content so if that's something you'd like to do please feel free I challenge you to get your photos up to the level of cat scarf and thank you for listening to me today