The Sweet Power of an Unsplash Submission
A little while back I sent my photo to the guys at Unsplash, a site that distributes 10 submitted high-res photos each week to whomever is on their mailing list, and posts them online for free download. Submitted photos are free for anyone to use for anything - no licensing, no attribution, just good pictures to use however you want.
Anyways, like I mentioned, I submitted a couple of photos and they put one online, which credits me and links back to this here site. The funnest part of all of this (funnest is a word, yes?) is seeing who is using this photo and for what. Matt even wrote a blog post about the traffic because he pays attention to this stuff wayyyy more than I do. Blogs about inspiration? Articles about finding Jesus? Album covers? Posts on hootsuite's blog, verizon.com and thoughtcatalog? Yes.
We were looking at the back-links last night (because thats what arrogant nerds do in their free time) and found this photography blog of Kelly Del Valle. Most of these links are just saying "image courtesy of..." but this one was the nicest to find - a little write-up!
This girl, Kelly (good name.), says that while she doesn't use Unsplash for her own projects, she uses it to find photo blogs and photographers worth following. She lists three photographers that she's discovered this way - some of her "favorite photography blogs" - and I happen to be one of those!
“She maintains that she isn’t a photographer, but she takes a lovely picture. Course, a graphic designer kind of has to have an eye for that sort of thing.”
Here's the thing. As I was telling Matt the other day, about 80% of the things I work on (sketches, photos, work-work, etc) never see the light of day. They lose funding, they get revised beyond recognition by the client, or they just never leave my desk. I've been doing some sort of creative work professionally for almost eight years now and it still gets me excited when someone else pays attention to something I created. So, pardon the not-so-humble brag today, and thank you, Kelly :)