5 Flickr Photo Freebie Sources

For those who are hunting freebie images to use, Flickr is a popular place for various archival entities to post collections of photos in the public domain, particular those of historic interest or value. Generally works that have passed into the public domain are free for anyone to use for any purpose, but you should always check the source for terms of use before assuming you can. It's also wise to give credit to the source of any public domain image.

Here are some interesting pics from five of my favorite Flickr freebie image sources (and to go to the complete collection, click on the name):

Library of Congress



Making History



The National Archives UK



National Library of Ireland on the Commons



Florida Memory



As to what you can do with them -- here's what I did just having some fun:



What happens when a Prohibition-era housewife opens the wrong bottle (I might actually have to write this one.)



Docket builds a defensive corset and all hell breaks loose. Or not.



Or maybe just the responses I wanted to send but didn't . . .

The View

One of the questions I've been asked most frequently since having my surgeries is "So how bad was it before?" It's tough to put into words, of course, and I wasn't completely aware of just how poor my sight was until after the operations. Glasses helped for a while, and I think with some eye issues over time you get used to them. Plus I was in denial, big time.

Losing the ability to recognize certain colors was what brought me back to reality. Black and dark blue slowly began looking the same, and then I couldn't distinguish any difference between orange, pink or red. I lost green and blue after that. I work with color every day with my art and sewing and quilting, so I couldn't pretend everything was okay anymore.

To give you something of a visual, this approximates what I was seeing from my left and right eye, without glasses, when I finally realized I had a problem:



Six months later this is all I could see with my glasses on:



If you're wondering how much better I am post-surgery, here is the same view with what I can see now:



Other than being able to see colors again and focus, I think the most startling difference is that I can see white again. I don't think I have in a couple of years. Now the world seems dazzling, as if I've been transported to another planet where everything is bright and beautiful.

I also had no idea my bathrooms were so clean, either. What do you know, I am a good housekeeper.

All kidding aside, if you are having problems with your eyes, go and get them checked as soon as you can. I actually procrastinated a bit with mine, first thinking I was just depressed, and then blaming menopause and age. On some level I knew something was seriously wrong, but I didn't want to think about it. I had to go almost blind before I went to the doctor, and now that I can see clearly again, I know I was a complete idiot to put it off -- so don't make the same mistake.

Worth a Hundred Thousand Words

Sorry I'm late posting today; Photobucket is being ornery for some reason.

While sorting through a box of photos at my favorite art store I found this uncredited image for sale. At first glance it looked like an illustration of that old chestnut take a long walk off a short pier. Something about it nudged my imagination in a different direction, though, so I added it to my stack of stuff.

Inspiration and imagination combined always produce some interesting results. Although the image seems grim, it delighted me. I've walked along a hundred piers like this because I've always loved the sea at night. I can't even tell you how much of my life I've spent sitting on the sand or perched on the end of a pier watching the moonlight on the water. One of my earliest memories became a journal entry about how as kids we used to spend hours running around after dark rescuing newborn loggerheads. My happy associations then blossomed into a poem about my guy and our magical first date, also at the beach. Now it's starting to grow into a story, and while I'm not sure where it's going, I've learned to leave it alone and give it time to percolate.

A few years ago I took this photo by the sea:



Some of you might even remember the blog post I wrote about it. The inspiration didn't end there; it kept growing in my head until I had the beginnings of a story. As I was outlining the original idea I realized my story pic was bigger than a short -- much bigger. While I had my doubts, I went along for the ride, taking notes as characters and situations began to take shape. As they did the grafitti took on new meaning, which became the flow of the plot as I asked and answered all the questions it brought to me: What makes us master ourselves? What drives us to take control of our lives? What happens to those who won't, or can't? What if someone had the ability to steal that from you, and take you over at any moment, and make you do anything they wanted?

Interested in more? You can read the rest of the story by investing in my novel Nightbred, due out in December.

Expecting a single photo or image inspiration to grow into a book is unrealistic, of course. Sometimes an appealing picture is just that -- a picture that you enjoy or that invokes happy memories. Every now and then, however, you will find an image that is more than a visual delight -- and you'll know it because it opens a kind of window in your head and expands as it shows you what no one else can see. Your job as a storyteller is to show others what you've seen through that window.

You can't do that if you only take a few seconds to look, so give it time. Make a hard copy of the image or photo and keep it over your desk or make it the cover of a notebook. Don't put yourself on a time limit, either; with my Master Yourself photo it took about four years from the day I took the shot to the day I wrote the last word of the novel it inspired. Keep looking at your image, keep thinking about it, and in time you may find an entire new world waiting to be explored.

Googling the Street View

Google may make armchair tourists out of all of us now that they are offering their Maps with Street View. This search engine allows you to enter an address, move a little figure onto the map and (if available) see a street-level view of that location.

Here's what a street in Paris looks like (click any image to see larger version):



You can also move around your location, street by street, block by block, and zoom in and around in all sorts of interesting ways. If you've never had the chance to explore a particular city or other location and/or can't travel there, this allows you to take a virtual walking tour of most places (there were a few places I tried to pull up that only offered a still shot, so it seems Google hasn't mapped every square inch of the Earth (yet).

I can't tell exactly how old these street views are, but I'd say probably at least six months but no more than two years old (if there is a note of exactly when the images were taken I didn't bother to look for it.) While faces and license plates are mainly blurred out, businesses, signs and other details are not. Here's a street where I used to go shopping in San Francisco's Chinatown:



I think this service is especially helpful for writers if you want to include a setting in your story that is a real place you've actually visited but haven't been back to visit in a long time. There was this spot out on the west coast where I used to sit and watch the sunset that I wanted to use in a story. Unfortunately I lived there many years ago, and as much as I'd love to go back there, I don't have the time or justification for the expense.

Relying on my memory, I wrote the location into the story with a lone bench, some rocks and the water. When I pulled up that spot on the street view, however, I saw that someone had put up a big ugly fence near my bench:



It takes some practice to learn how to use the different symbols and zooms to move around your street view, but I think it's worth taking the time to play with and learn. Plus if you can't afford to take a research trip, it may be the next best thing to being there.

Camera as Well

I've gotten into the habit of taking my camera with me almost everywhere, because the ordinary things I photograph often give me story ideas. For example, this spider (click on any image to see a larger version):



She set up house in one corner of my porch near where I like to write (and before I relocated her, I took a shot to show my guy.) That's when I noticed the little red dot on her butt, which made me think of another kind of bug (the reclusive, unnoticed surveillance variety.) Would you notice a bug on a bug? Probably not. Could you use a bug as a bug? Why not? And thinking about how I'd use her as the other kind of bug ended up in a scene in Frostfire.



I was in a park with my daughter when I noticed a little artificial spring and decided to take a photo of the water. As soon as I focused on it, the sunlight hitting the surface began shooting bright vertical light beams across my camera's display. It was almost like the transporter visual effect from Star Trek TNG. Despite this, the picture I snapped only showed a modest amount of sparkle confined to the surface of the water. Now I'm sure there's a logical reason why what I saw on the display didn't match what I saw with my eyes, but what I thought of was something I actually needed to up the wattage for a story I'll be writing next year.

In the same park I also saw these odd wee pods sprouting from a big plant that I didn't recognize. I stopped to admire them because they look just like teeny little pumpkins. If mice ever needed jack-o-lanterns, these would be the perfect size for them. And if mice celebrate Halloween, they'd need little costumes, too. They probably dress up as cats and owls and exterminators before they go out trick-or-treating. I bet on Halloween night all the candy the human kids drop while they're making their rounds ends up in the paws of trick-or-treating mice. Then when it's very late, and all the human kids are back home waiting for their mothers to inspect their bags, the mice gather in the park to swap mini-size candies (everyone wants the Snickers, of course) and have tiny pumpkin-carving contests. They catch fireflies and put them inside to light up their jack-o-lanterns, and just before dawn they dig little holes and plant the pumpkins so the humans don't find them -- and more plants will grow for next year's Halloween for Mice. That would make a cute illustrated children's book. Only this year, one drowsy mouse forgets to plant his pumpkin, and the next morning it's found by . . . and more of that would make a fun young reader book. All of that came from just this one picture.

A camera can be a marvelous tool to create writing prompts for yourself. If you have one and you haven't used it in a while, take it out, dust it off and play with it for a week. Take a shot of anything and everything that catches your eye, then sort through the images and see what sparks your imagination.