Architectural Photography: 7 Brilliant Images

 Photography, Stock Photography  No Responses »
Jan 092013
 

Architecture can be traced back to 10000 BC and the Neolithic Period. It has not been nearly so long that photographers have captured the wonders of architecture in their camera lenses.

Visionary photographer Frederick Evans is largely credited with influencing future architectural photography. His famous photograph The Sea of Steps utilized perspective and a strong sense of place.

Modern photographers have continued to push the envelope when it comes to architectural photography. Capturing the nuance of color in architecture, shape, pattern, and contrast has enhanced the art form and provided inspiration to the art community. Today, we look at 7 brilliant examples of architectural photography and credit the talented photographers who captured these images. All of these images are royalty-free, and would make fantastic wall art or graphic design elements.

wall-of-colors

A Wall of Colors – photographed by Shi Yali

brooklyn bridge

The Brooklyn Bridge, one of the world’s most famous bridges. Captured in monochrome to enhance its lines. By Ron Sumners.

Ceramic Tiles Architecture

Shape and Leading Lines are at work in this photograph of Ceramic Tiles architecture. Photo by Shi Yali.

Light Painting and Architectural Photography

A wild combination of light painting and architectural photography. This brilliant image of a parking garage at night utilizes time lapse and perfect exposure. Photo by Katrina Brown

Light at the End of the Tunnel

The proverbial “Light at the End of the Tunnel” has a subtle twist in this image, which utilizes a slight camera tilt to add drama to the leading lines. Silhouettes of a man and boy lend additional interest. By Shi Yali.

The Old Church

A good choice for architectural photography is an edifice with character. This old church standing in isolation is enhanced by the clear path leading toward it, and the sense of nothingness surrounding. By Laurin Rinder.

Spooky castle

The combination of an eerie blue lighting and the presence of the moon emphasize the architectural details of this old castle. Photography by Clivia.

When capturing architecture in your photography, consider shapes and leading lines and how they lead the viewer’s eyes into the picture. Sometimes a slight tilt to the camera can emphasize the strength of patterns. Utilize side lighting, which best captures contrast, when emphasizing the strength and details of the architecture.

For a much larger selection of images, we invite you to browse our architectural photography category at Warmpicture.

Related Posts

Top 15 Warmpicture Keywords

 Warmpicture Updates  No Responses »
Oct 072012
 

We hope everyone is having a wonderful weekend! It’s a cool Autumn day in upstate New York where the Warmpicture main office is located. A good day for hot apple cider, pie, and NFL football.

Want some ideas for image topics to search for? Here are the top 15 keywords searched by your fellow designers and bloggers at Warmpicture.

 

Top 15 Stock Photo Keywords for 10/7/2012

Halloween, flower, background, Christmas, computer, autumn, abstract, beach, business, wedding, fashion, grunge, dog, party, and heart.

halloween jack-o-lantern

Halloween Jack-o-lantern by Jo Ann Snover

 

Save on Your Next Image Purchase

We want to thank all of our new customers for making Warmpicture the fastest growing stock image gallery on the web! Remember that you are purchasing your images direct from your fellow artists and photographers. We believe in supporting the artist community, and we know you do too.

To save 15% on your next stock image or subscription purchase before the end of October, we invite you to use the coupon code: pumpkin at checkout.

And once again, thank you for supporting the independent artists of Warmpicture Stock Photos!

Related Posts

Website Design: Image SEO

 Blogging, Design  No Responses »
Dec 062011
 

Last week we began discussing Website Design from an SEO perspective, and demonstrated the importance of Page Titles. Today we will show you how to properly include images into your design to ensure the search engines find your website and rank you for your target content.

Aesthetic Appeal of Imagery

Whether you are using raster drawings, stock photos, or your own photography, there is no question that the inclusion of high quality images vastly increases the aesthetic appeal of any website or blog design.

african-american-student-laptopProvided the images used in your design relate to your content, they will increase the appeal of your design to your readers.

Studies show web designs which utilize images have a higher visitor return rate. Studies also show that visitors spend more time on pages which utilize images in their design. The same websites have a lower bounce rate too.

Image inclusion in articles breaks up the article in a way which makes it more digestible for the reader. Besides adding emphasis to your article or blog content, the use of images increases the chance that a reader will continue reading your article, rather than abandon it.

Images and SEO

A search engine can only see words. It doesn’t know that the image on your Scared Construction Workerwebsite is a Monet painting or a Lisa FX construction worker. No matter how artistic and aesthetically pleasing the image is, the search engines will ignore it completely unless we tell them about our image.

The first thing we need to do is name our image appropriately. If you downloaded a stock photo with a generic file name, you need to rename that photo before uploading it to your blog or website.

The photo name should follow good SEO practice. It should be simple and relevant to the content on your website. If your website focuses on growing flowers, a good file name for an image might be “growing-dahlia-flowers.jpg”.

Notice our use of dashes? We use them because search engines struggle with underscores and tend to concatenate the words together when underscores or other characters are used. Google will recognize three separate words in this example, all of which can be found through their main search engine as well as Google Images.

Image metadata needs to be included. Make sure to use the image Title and Alt tags. Don’t leave them blank. These tags also tell the search engines about our images. Make them simple and concise, but absolutely relevant. Do not consider spamming.

I like to make the Title and Alt tags similar to, or the same as, the file name. Except there is no need for dashes. Using our example above, our image title and alt tag could be “Growing Dahlia Flowers.”

One more thing. Don’t include words like and, or, the, with, and so on if you can help it. Those words slightly decrease the relevancy of your true key words that you want search engines to focus on.

Image Placement

Image placement within our design or article comes down to both artistic reasoning and SEO importance. If the target key words used in our image tags are very relevant to our content, then the higher we place the image toward the top of the webpage, the more important the search engines will deem the image to be.

This makes sense. We tend to put the most important items near the top of our websites and blogs. Less important items are generally in the footer. Search engine algorithms are programmed to use this logic when determining which content is most important on a page.

Don’t sacrifice your design by placing an image near the top of your webpage if the correct artistic placement is much lower. Just be aware of how search engines will use your choice of placement to weight the importance of the tags used in the image.

We hope we gave you some good ideas you can use in your web and blog designs. Next week we will focus on some more techniques for improving our ranking and visibility within search engines.

Related Posts

Top 5 Football Stock Photos

 Stock Photography, Warmpicture Updates  No Responses »
Dec 032011
 

You cannot talk about American collegiate football without talking about rankings!

In Division-I, it’s the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) which creates controversy and keeps eyes glued to the computer rankings all season. In small college football, the rankings determine how teams are seeded in the national championship, and which at-large teams get selected for the tournament.

Who’s number one? We’re number one!

As the small college football playoffs continue, the BCS championship approaches, and the NFL playoffs loom closer, it’s time for our Top five. But today we aren’t choosing our five favorite NCAA football teams. We are choosing our five favorite royalty free stock photos for use in all your football related designs and articles.

Our criteria for making the top five was simple. The image had to be an eye catcher which depicts the excitement of the college football atmosphere, or it had to capture the power of the players on the field. Second, it had to be free from the need of a model release, so it could be included in any commercial design (such as an advertisement) as well as editorial projects. And it had to flat out kick tail!

football-line-stock-photoOur list begins with Laurin Rinder’s awe inspiring football line stock photo.

The power of American football is most evident “in the trenches.” It is here that the offensive and defensive lines attempt to overpower each other.

The line which wins this battle often dominates the football game and leads its team to victory.

Laurin’s choice to convert the image to black and white is brilliant. The heavy contrasts emphasize the power of football inside the trenches.

Dan Padavona’s NCAA Football Catch and Tackle image is a top seller at multiple ncaa-football-stock-photostock photo agencies. Whereas Laurin captures the power of American football, Dan captures the speed and grace of the game.

This sharp image is taken just as the receiver catches a pass over the middle, with a defender diving across his back from behind for the tackle. There is no question why this photo has been featured in numerous articles and design projects. It has plenty of copy space, and makes a great splash page for a website.

football-dive-stock-photoOur third favorite American football stock image comes from Laurin Rinder again. Laurin has made quite a name for himself as a photographer, but his very popular football images are best sellers at numerous stock agencies.

Laurin captures the beauty of the skill positions in NCAA football in this photo of a running back diving over the line for a touchdown.

The running back is coming right at us. Selective focus separates the running back from the other players, which is an important methodology for drawing the eye to the important subject matter.

Next up is a hilarious photo from Lisa “FX” Young. Lisa has a good sense of football-sports-fan-imagehumor, and it really shows in this image of a football fan getting a little nutty in his exuberance.

We are reminded now and then that “fan” is short for “fanatic.” This football fanatic image is all in good fun, and could be used in a variety of design projects dealing with American football and its fans.

The image is isolated for seamless inclusion into any white background.

football-stadium-crowdLast but not least on our list is one of the best selling sports abstract images at numerous stock agencies.

This football stadium image has been used in various design and advertising campaigns promoting football ticket sales, television and radio packages, and more. This abstract image utilizes crowd silhouettes with a large football stadium in the background.

The subject of the image is the fan’s enjoyment of the game, and hence the popularity of the image with designers promoting football ticket and media packages.

Warmpicture has all of these American football stock images and plenty more choices online. With new photos being added every day, we can hardly keep up with all the cool choices available!

Related Posts

Using Images to Increase Blog Traffic

 Blogging  No Responses »
Mar 072011
 
Blogging is wonderful, isn’t it?  Just find an interesting subject, start blogging, and watch your traffic build.  Then throw some Google Ads on the page, and watch your hobby turn into an impressive source of passive income.Los Angeles TrafficIf only it were that easy.  No matter what subject you choose to blog about, if it is worthwhile, you can bet there are many others blogging on the same subject and hogging the attention.  But when your blog rises up the search ranks and gets loyal followers, it can indeed become quite lucrative.  An entire book could be written on increasing traffic to your blog.  In fact several have been written.  This article will focus on the importance of using images to attract more traffic to your blog, and to convert a higher percentage of your traffic into loyal followers.Images add traffic in many interesting ways.  If you use proper SEO techniques by naming each image on your blog, you will vastly increase your chance of having your blog article indexed by Google.  Not only will Google be working off your title, keywords, and text, but also it will have images to index within the article.  Make sure you rename each image to match the key content of your blog, and also utilize the “alt” description.As an added bonus image search engines will now have a way to index to your blog.  This includes the major image search engines such as Yahoo! and Google Images.  You are literally doubling your potential search engine exposure by including an image in your blog.That should convince you that the proper use of images will drive additional traffic to your blog.  But the key to buildingRoad to Success Sign traffic over the long term is to convert, or keep, a percentage of the traffic you attract as blog followers. Studies have shown that images in blogs increase the return rate of visitors over blogs which have no images. You want your traffic to come back for more content, and click on those ads, right?  This is where the importance of choosing the right image comes in.

Obviously the image must clearly relate to your content.  This much is a given.  However a poorly chosen photograph or image is just as likely to scare away your traffic as poorly written content.  Photography is a demanding art, and not many people are very good at it.  Just like most people cannot draw particularly well. You don’t want a poor photograph on your blog anymore than you want your Uncle Hank to draw you a fine art print for hanging in your living room.

Choose your images from competent photographers which use good lighting, sharp focus, and pleasing colors.  Not only are these photos pleasing to look at, they will greatly improve your visitors’ perception of your blog and increase the chances that they will return.  Plenty of photographers offer blog sized photos for $5 or less.  If you need a drawing or vector art piece for your blog, make sure to choose a fine piece of art rather than the cheapest image you can find.

Money TreeYou can probably guess my opinion of “free images” from the last paragraph.  In all walks of life, you tend to get what you pay for.  I have seen plenty of free images, but I have not seen many good free images. The shame of it is many bloggers destroy the look of their blogs with free images, when they could have had an excellent image for less than $5. Which brings me to a lesson I learned in college.

You need to spend money to make money.

Luckily you need not spend much at all to realize a large return on your investment.

Many of my blogs use ads which pay about $0.40 per click.  If you attract just 13 people to your blog and get them to click on an ad on your page, you will have paid for the image and made a little money too.  More importantly you will have increased traffic to your blog over the long term by giving your readers a better experience, and that means even more passive income for you.

- Dan Padavona, Warmpicture

Related Posts