Contextual Photography

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How to Curate a Contextual Image

Write down the type of image you need (ex: coffee shop, camping)
Perform a Google Image search on the word
Create a keyword list from the search results
Extract colors from Google Image Search
Narrow the list down to 3 words
Search for these 3 words on stock photography websites

Note: Do not use any images on google search in your portfolio.

Websites Mentioned in Lesson

Free Photo Sites

Paid Photo Sites

stocksy.com
shutterstock.com
gettyimages.com
photodune.com
creativemarket.com
istock.com

Transcript

What is meant when I say contextual photography? The unique thing is that photos have a powerful way of visually communicating a story and you don't even have to use any words. So contextual photography is looking at an image or an other elements and seen visually, How it says the scene can't communicate certain feelings how it communicates certain words and you automatically gain an understanding of the environment and what's going on that is what is meant when I say contextual photography and this is one of the most powerful elements of your portfolio if you can learn to do this well, then majority of the work is done for you when laying out your portfolio.

The good news is you don't have to be a world-class photographer in order to do it. This is what you might hear some people or creative say they have an eye for what looks good. And whether you realize it or not, we've been marketed to so much over time you in a sense start to have that innate eye as well you start to have that eye to say, I know why certain things look good, and I know why certain things look strange, but I can't really tell you why but you're able to build up and say certain things piece together. The reason why those things work or the reason why people have an eye for certain things is contextual photography. You're able to set a scene and lay it to where someone can understand visually what's going on. In order to illustrate this point let's go to my desktop and look at a great example of contextual photography.

So right now I'm on the home screen of Behance and if you haven't noticed this before but has something called curated galleries. Right, you can click on this and actually see some of the best work chosen by the Behance curation team and what they want to highlight.

They have a section called photography and you can look at studio portraits and many Landscapes and other things just to kind of show you what I mean by contextual photography. I tend to find a lot of it. Here and if you actually just look through the photography section, you'll start to get an understanding of what I'm saying, but let me give you an exact example.

So on Behance, and I found this in the photography section there is a project called morning stroll and actually what's feature that's what this means. It was featured before and morning stroll does a great job of communicating visually what is going on. So, all we know is the title of this project is called morning stroll, and if we look at the imagery we start to get an idea of what is happening.

So on this image, we just have a bench and we see some Autumn Leaves. When we see someone walking in the Autumn Leaves, we automatically start seeing some colors and we have an idea of what season it is right leaves on always look like that in the summer and spring months. So this must be towards the fall.

We keep going. We see a nice lake or pond here with a shack or a house in the back in the way. The light is coming through must be morning time right morning in the fall and it just looks very calming and again this picture here you can see that things are a little colder. So maybe it's a little later or it's in a place where as soon as fall hits it starts to get very cold, right? We can start to glean some of that information and again amazing picture here.

The center of the photo is on this person and that's where the light is pointing to but this looks like a very nice morning walk and to be honest, I wish I could take this walk. I wish I could go here and go to these places because these things these sites are things that are not in my neighborhood and to me this is just very calming, which is very calming and relaxing and I don't know who went on this morning stroll, but I'm getting the impression that they're sharing their stroll with me with these pictures and even though I wasn't able to go on the morning stroll myself. I can get some of the same emotions from it, right. So when we scroll through this project. We get some of that feeling so some of the same feelings we're receiving them as well.

That is what is meant by contextual photography all we know is it was a morning stroll and so much information was communicated to us. When we looked at this particular project. That's the goal of what you want to do for your portfolio project. You want to take the time to. You know highlight the work that you did, show your process as certain elements, but images will go a long way in visually communicating your story and making the viewer understand without even using any words.

We've talked a lot in theory about contextual photography. Let's look at a couple examples, So, let's go back to the desktop and look at an actual example. So right now I'm on the desktop and I'm actually on the Google search engine home page. Let's say I had a project and that project was to focus on a coffee shop.

Maybe I did some type of branding for a coffee shop and I want to add some elements to my portfolio that enhances it with contextual photography. So the first thing I'll do is I will actually search coffee shop. Now different things are going to come up coffee shops in my area. I need to click on the images tab in Google and now it's taking me to you know, just listing certain images of what it means to be a coffee shop now on this page.

The best thing to do here is start looking at certain words and also start writing out certain things to highlight the elements that you see for a coffee shop. Here are some questions we can use to help create this keyword list. Where is this located? What do you do there? What feeling do you get? and what items are things are usually at the location?

Right. So just to help out with this you can even see here that there are some words at the top that can help you in a sense capture some things about a coffee shop, but I definitely like to scroll down and look at the images and write certain things.

So in just looking at this I came up with a couple of terms, oak, reclaimed wood, coffee mug, tabletops, coffee beans laptops, reading studying, conversation, relaxing, calming, that some of the feelings that I get, street corners, hand lettering. So thinking about menus there's some hand lettering on the menus, expresso, Aeropress, chemex.

Those are things or machines or tools people use to make coffee. Leather and then we start getting into colors, white, black, brown, dark tan. Those are all things in elements that are captured when I look at these photos for a coffee shop, right? Those are common elements that I see within all of these photos.

So they're also mental and visual triggers where someone could see okay. I see reclaimed wood, people sitting down, I see a coffee mug, this is for a coffee shop. So three words should be able to in a sense capture the environment and the ambiance of what actually is going on. So I mentioned earlier you can get keywords from the top of this Google search image section, but nothing you can do is actually click on an image and the image will pull up the image will load you can right click and select 'copy image address'.

And you can go to a website called coolors.co, there's many others and I'll put this in the notes for this lesson, but there are many others as well. I just like this site because to me it's very clean and straightforward and I've used it on client projects, but there's other sites like this. You can actually extract colors from a particular photo.

So I'm actually going to click on this icon where it says pick colors from image. And it's asking for the link. I'll paste the link here hit okay, and whenever the new page loads is going to show me certain colors are elements from this particular photo. Now the thing to note is these are maybe the colors you'll use when highlighting your portfolio project or you can just look around at other things and really just get an idea of the visual cues.

That are here and perhaps in looking at these colors you're adding them to your keyword list to say, okay, these are common colors associated with a coffee shop. Regardless of that though take the time to get your keyword list. Then when you have your keyword list you are going to use that to help you find other contextual images.

We can't use any of the images that we found on Google search because they might be owned by other photographers, other companies, other businesses. Right. So you want to go to a site whether it is royalty free to get those photos and to pay for them if you have to but as I mentioned there's free sites and paid sites.

So let's actually go to a free site. So right now I am at Unsplash unsplash.com, this has become a widely popular site. For a place to get free photos. So the idea behind this community is, you know different people post their work and photos you can use in your projects. But you also want to contribute by adding your own photo so contribute to the community and make it that much more better.

But Unsplash these photos are all free and you have the freedom to use them in your projects if need be, just be respectful enough to give credit to the original person who took the picture. But let's just take a look at what I mean when I say contextual photography. I will type coffee shop, right?

So let's say I was designing for a coffee shop and I wanted some contextual imagery and as I scroll down, I can already see certain elements. That would be good for a portfolio. Like here's a menu, right? So those are these are the type of things that people are used to seeing here's a menu stating what is actually being served right that can also be a clue to okay, I get that.

This is a coffee shop, right and you can somewhat scroll down. And look through this and just have different elements to highlight that this portfolio project is a coffee shop. I know for me personally one thing in one element that is at coffee shops. It was on my list is Baristas. These are the people who serve you at a coffee shop if I type in barista.

This screams coffee shop. So I know personally if I was making a portfolio project. For a coffee shop logo or branding that I did. I would definitely use one of these images. I might even use an image like this. No, this doesn't necessarily have to be the exact business. I made it for but I can use it on my portfolio to tell the story of this is for a coffee shop right now.

I probably wouldn't use that picture because it's a little crowded right but any of these images this is one that's better. It's just someone making coffee right? I don't know if you all noticed earlier, but. And when I use it on the Google search one of the words was hipster, I believe. Yes right here.

It says hipster. So to be honest this person looks and is dressed like a hipster, right? I could easily use this in my portfolio project to highlight something that I'm creating again. If there's any foreign branding I can, you know, do some photo retouching and remove it. But again, these are all the images I could use to highlight a coffee shop.

So that is what is meant by contextual photography. We looked at an example of a coffee shop, but that's a little easy. Let's try another example. Let's say camping. Let's look at what we can do for camping. So again, I am going to navigate to unsplash and this time I'm going to type in Camp. I also go to Google Search and I will type in camping.

And again, we can repeat the same process. What do I see here in these images? I'm asking to write down different things. I see tents sleeping bags. I see campfires. I see trees nature Forest icy Rivers icy mountains. I can write down all of these terms because again, they're visual cues that are telling me.

These are the elements associated with camping getting out there in nature and having a tent and that somewhat will set the scene again. I can go back to unsplash. I type camping any of these images I can use or grab to help enhance my portfolio project. This is a great photo here and I've never been here before.

This is in Turkey. I've never been here before but this tent this fire and. A sky showing all the stars that have haven't been affected by any light pollution. This is amazing. Right? This is a surreal look at what it means to camp and that's what people are really looking for those surreal photos that take people out of where they live and Visually place them somewhere else.

This photo is a little playful because it has someone in their socks relaxing but. If you set this the right way, you may feel like you're actually in a tent you might feel like you're actually relaxing here as well on this camping trip. So again, you can look through these photos and find those things that are more perfect for camping.

Now. This is an excellent camping picture here, but it really just depends on what you're actually using for a project. I personally wouldn't use this camping photo because camping maybe relaxing. It depends on the goal of my portfolio project. So if I made some branding unless I have some branding that I'm going to superimpose on these elements.

I probably wouldn't use this. But if I was selling Camp gear something like this is actually perfect, right? It just depends on what I would like to do with it. So again, those are two examples of utilizing contextual photography. It may not be straightforward at first, but as you repeat the process, we just went over you'll get a trained eye.

For what looks good, what could work and what's not and we looked at one of these sites. We looked at unsplash. That's just one of the sites there are many sites that have free and paid resources and just quickly. Let's look at those earlier. We looked at unsplash but there's also another side. I like to use which is called stock up.

Right and I typed in camping again. These are slightly different images we can search through this to also find. Photos that help us enhance our portfolio by following the same process that I mentioned earlier, right? We can look through this there's another side I like which compiles all of these together.

It's called all the free stock.com and here it's you can list all the free stock photo sites the most common ones, right it lists all of them here. And it's just a great collection to look through all of these to find different images. So you really don't have an excuse for not utilizing images to enhance your portfolio with all of these free resources, but because they are free you might run into an issue where.

Everybody uses them or their most common or people will start to see that wait. I know. This person didn't take that image strictly for this portfolio project because I've seen it everywhere. Another site is stock. See now. This is a paid website when you will be able to find images that not everyone uses right and they're more.

Unique and you can just take the time to look through these pictures in order to find out whatever it is that you need there. I stock is another place you can go to I stock is by Getty Images. You could also go directly to Getty Images. In order to find a large collection of photos as well and just look through different things here, right?

If you are Getty Images, let's type camping again. And you'll find more photos as well, but it's paid right but this is also a very popular site people tend to use Getty a lot and you may use some of the same photos that other people use as well. Either way. This is a great photo for Barista that we looked at earlier.

I would I would definitely use this on my portfolio because things are more arranged in the background. This is a really good picture. This is also an awesome picture here. But that's besides the point. So another one is Shutterstock. You can come here same thing search for different photos that you want to use here.

And this is you know more photos. This is a great picture here people having fun in the coffee shop. Maybe you even superimpose some branding on these cups. That would be very useful. Even this here would be great. And the last one I'll highlight is creative Market. They have a photo section. And once again, you can go to that photo section search for photos that you could use for your portfolio.

Just make sure to search. And you'd be able to look through some of these photos as well. They tend to have good prices on their individual photos, which I like there tend to be less expensive and some of the other Solutions. So again, I will place all of the photo sites I listed in more in the notes of this lesson, but ultimately I said it before and I'll say it again contextual photography can be your most powerful tool.

To crafting your portfolio if you get good at this skill and it won't take long if you do it on the regular, but if you get good at this skill, your portfolio will be about seventy percent of the way there and you just need to sprinkle in other elements to take it to that next level.

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