Who doesn’t like old photos? And they’re made to order for blogging and social posts.
Stock photos look posed and phony. But a lot of old archive photos have this natural quirkiness– probably because they aren’t trying to be something they’re not.
You can almost hear them saying: “Come on, add a caption! Stick on a new head!!”
Here’s an example (below). I used an image editing program (Pixelmator) to select the two figures and paste them onto a plain background. Then I added dialog and substituted my pretty face for the certificate.
I used the After image in a promotional video. You can view it here.
Where do you find such images? I find mine in the The Commons, which is run by the photo-sharing site, Flickr.
The project’s goal is to provide access to publicly held photo collections.
Some of the biggest and best: Internet Archive Book Images (over 5 million images scanned from books), The British Library, The Library Company of Philadelphia (some great illustrated posters), The U.S. National Archives, The New York Public Library, and The Library of Congress.
There are about 115 participating institutions. You can see the full list here.
You never know what you’re going to find: photos, prints, woodcuts, diagrams, maps, advertisements, illustrations, cartoons, postcards– and on all sorts of subjects.
Most Commons images do not have any copyright restrictions. In such cases, you’ll see “No known copyright restrictions” displayed beneath the image. You’re free to use those images any way you want.
