In defense of Flickr and Compfight

Last month, two students complained that “Compfight and Flickr sucked,” and that they could not find the images they were looking for. I challenged them by asking them if they thought my slides sucked or if their superteacher Alex Rister’s slides sucked. They laughed, said no, and asked why. My response–because we only use Flickr and search only through Compfight. If you can’t find what you are looking for in the world’s largest image social networking site, then the problem has more to do with the way you are searching. Flickr is awesome. I credit this storehouse of images with completely transforming my use of imagery in my slides. Compfight was a true blessing; it filters out anything I cannot use and provides me with relevant results every time. Both forced me to come to terms with the fact that I, like many, was a “slide sloth.”

According to Alex Rister, Google Images has made us all “slide sloths” (Source); we put in a search term “evolve” and expect magical results. Because Google Images is running an unfiltered search of the entire web, students often find exactly what they are looking for–too bad it is too small, cheesy clip art, watermarked stock photography, or not labeled for commercial use. We must change the way we actually search for images. I am cooking up a more thorough “how to” on searching through Compfight and Flickr for Six Minutes, but in the meantime, remember, to find great images on Flickr, follow amazing people like JD Hancock, search for concrete things that represent your abstract ideas, and be patient–I have spent hours looking for that perfect image. The first slide to my latest deck took me 4 hours of adapting search terms, rethinking my metaphor, and adapting my approach!

My deck is three images from being done (and by done I mean a first draft that several folks have the duty to now destroy and decimate) and I have a full day of grading ahead of me, so just a quick post today to share some the images I’ve found while searching for hmm….three weeks…with you. There were many more images I loved that I did not use, but these are a few of the highlights.

Incredible Bokeh

Incredible Bokeh by JD Hancock

Field 0 by zachstern

Freedom by Angelo Gonzalez

In the rapture (explored) by Elizabeth Haslam

Meditation by deadoll

Crab Nebula: Energy for 100,000 Suns (NASA, Chandra, 11/23/09) by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center

Tagged , , , , , ,

3 thoughts on “In defense of Flickr and Compfight

  1. […] and to succeed.  Not every person was immediately sold on the visual design concepts I taught.  Not every student understood the importance of Compfight and Flickr.  But this is a good thing!  Resistance helps a student actually […]

  2. JD Hancock says:

    Thank you for sharing my photography, as always. If your students have ideas about how photographers like me could make our photos more “find-able,” I would love to hear them.

  3. […] is the same challenge corporate presenters face). On this blog, I’ve shared several ways to search through compfight.com, which is one of the best resources for free images available to corporate folks. Another option is […]

Leave a Reply

Please log in using one of these methods to post your comment:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

An Ethical Island

How to Teach Without a Lecture and other fun

CREATIVE GRAPHIC DESIGNER

An Artist A Graphic / Web Designer / Blog Designer An Art dealer

Metscher's Musings

My weekly musings in Communications, Social Media, and Public Relations

hovercraftdoggy

Art, Architecture, Design and Photography - a curated glimpse into an infinite world of beauty and creativity

Moving People to Action

from Homer's Odyssey: "Many were the men whose minds he learned"

Remote Possibilities

Here’s to better presenting!

Design Basics

Helping you to make yourself clear

Jitesh's Domain

Game Designer. Producer. Gamer.

Simply Presentation

better presenting through simplicity

Homes by Helene Delgado

Your Neighborhood Real Estate Expert

The Validated Hypochondriac

Turns out there was something wrong afterall...

Y Generation Presentation

Present yourself! // Mutasd meg, ki vagy!

SLIDES THAT ROCK

Stand Out, Connect, Sell Your Idea!

Speak for Yourself

Claire Duffy's blog about public speaking and communication (in real life). Speak well, do well!

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 1,212 other followers

%d bloggers like this:
https://tweakyourslides.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/in-defense-of-flickr-and-compfight/
tweakyourslides.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-27
75316
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:HOOSUBX6IFZSGG6F3I7W4SLP6LY3FNWD
<urn:uuid:9d09a56b-7ca5-4361-ab31-5f323d0836a5>
2015-06-29T23:09:23Z
192.0.78.13
sha1:EFBKL6BZHVGPZADXNL76OVRVQX5XH4LU
<urn:uuid:1bfba643-6940-4c57-a753-95007bf0404c>
https://tweakyourslides.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/in-defense-of-flickr-and-compfight/
length
response
<urn:uuid:0636e301-1151-4595-83fa-55162e716886>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-179-60-89.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-27
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf