A Thousand Words: Your Photo In A Make Use Of Article

So you think you’re a hot photographer?  Here’s your chance to prove it to the world.

MakeUseOf has set up a Flickr group to which you can submit your stunning photos.  We’ll use the best and most relevant images for our articles.  Not all MakeUseOf articles have photos of course, some just use screenshots (which are accepted as well), but quite often a photo will be able to get a point across much better than words or a screenshot.

As someone once said “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

Here’s how it will work. You submit photos that you think might fit well with a yet-to-be-written article on MakeUseOf.  They could be techy type images like computers and iPods and things.  Or they could be anything else really, for example, an article about working late into the night might involve coffee and sleepy eyes.

We’ll also ask you from time to time to submit pictures based on a theme.  A MakeUseOf author may be working on an article that requires a particular type of photo.  We might be specific in our requests: woman sitting on grass in summer with Macbook or we might be more general: yellow, in which case it would be up to you to interpret the theme.  When we make requests, we’ll make them in the Flickr group’s discussion section, not on MakeUseOf.com so you should join the group and check in as often as you can.

All types of pictures will be accepted into the group (unless they’re pornographic or otherwise inappropriate) but any picture you submit must be licensed Creative Commons and they must be your own legal property (in other words, you must own the legal copyright to the image and it must not have been stolen from someone else). Here’s how to change the license to Creative Commons.

Please tag your images very descriptively.  The more descriptive tags there are, the easier it is for us to find what we’re looking for.

woman, computer, laptop, macbook, grass, green, summer, red, sitting, outdoors, reading

is much better than

computer, outside

Please don’t be disappointed if your photo isn’t chosen.  It doesn’t mean it’s a bad photo, it’s just that another photo fit a little better with the article.

Image archives

While we may not use your photo immediately, MakeUseOf authors may dip into the image archives when looking for pictures, so please leave your pictures in the pool and make sure you keep the license Creative Commons.

There are no restrictions on photoshopping your images, or editing them in other free image editors, so edit to your heart’s content.  Even a badly photoshopped image might work in an article on tips about image editing.

We might also post an article every now and then showing off some of our favourite pictures that didn’t make it into an article, or haven’t yet.

As thanks for using your picture, we’ll give you credit and link back to your image on Flickr.

Oh yeah, we’ll be uploading the image to our own servers rather than hotlinking to it on Flickr, so once we incorporate the image into an article, it’s permanently part of that article.

So, get out there and start shooting.

Picture Credits: cupcakes2, Ed Yourdon, redjar