I found myself stuck for inspiration the other day so I thought I'd get some ideas from other images, but not in the sense of stealing (see below)

StumbleUpon

Stumbleupon was the first place I started looking. By using the toolbar I was able to select Photography (within Art) and only show photos. When I do find an image I like, apart from the thumbs up, I also tend to have a look at the rest of the site. That leads me onto some of the following sites.

Stumbleupon tends to point to three types of sites when used this way:

1. Photo Communities
2. Photographers' own sites
3. Sites that just have lists of images

1 and 2 are useful since at least you can reference the original photographer and maybe get in touch if you want more details on how the images were created. I have issues with the 3rd type since there's usually no reference to the images being works of others. If anything, they're just grabbing traffic so visitors will click on adverts.

Photo Communities

You have to mention flickr in any photo community discussion, but it's important to realise that it's not the only one. And for many purposes, it's not the best. I don't think much of the average quality on Flickr; it's dragged down by the mass of snapshots. There are some truly great images on Flickr, but overall it's a site for sharing images about your friend's dog, mixed in with some creative and fine art.

Here's a hint for when you're looking at some of the foreign-language sites: a lot are built using software written in English, so if you hover over a menu link, the English usually shows up in the status bar of your browser.

Some of the photo communities I've visited recently.

• Dgrin
• 1x
  
• Flickr
• Plfoto
• Photo.net
• Photodom
• Foto Community
  
• Photosight.ru
• Photosight.com
• Photoforum
• Fotokritik
• Fotocommunity
• 35photo

So now what?

So I've found some images that interest me, what am I going to do with them. I want to use them as references for my own development. Each image was selected to:

• Prompt a new theme
• Prompt new techniques, e.g. texturing the light from a flash using a blind
• To study, deconstruct and reverse engineer the image in order to understand what makes it appealing

In my searches, I deliberately chose some subjects that I don't have much experience of. For me, it's important to realise that the aim is not to copy the images, but to learn from them.

Technorati Tags: creativity inspiration inspiring photos photo inspiration Photography photography