Scariest Animals to Photograph

Whether they make your skin crawl or make you want to run for your life, there are some animals that are just plain scary. For photographers, it can be even worse. They have to sometimes fight their natural instinct and become comfortable enough to photograph these animals.

From the life-threatening to the creepy, here are the animals that give us nightmares.

Snakes - Especially cobras. Venomous and intimidating. It’s not that we don’t trust them or anything, but it’s also not exactly the best recipe for close-up photograpghy.



Spiders – Classic scary. Any kind of spiders. Too many eyes and too many legs to not not be frightening. The fatter and harrier, the scarier.



Sharks – Particularly the Great White Shark. With the added challenge of being underwater, sharks make for a frightening subject. Maybe it’s the movie, or maybe it’s the rows of sharp, razor-like teeth. Although they are unlikely to attack, we have no desire to swim up and give them a big hug either.



Lions - The perfect image of ferocity. They are big and strong, and very likely faster than you. Get a camera with a great zoom.



Millipedes – Take the creepiness of a snake and add a couple hundred legs. No, thanks! And the Giant African Millipede can be almost 16 inches long!

Capturing Emotions in Photos

One of the most difficult challenges for stock photographers is accurately capturing emotion in their images. The facial expression of the subject determines the mood of an image in many cases, so that is where the challenge lies.

There are several things to consider when striving to portray a particular emotion through the facial expression of the model. It needs to be a little more apparent and stronger than what a person may show in reality. At the same time, it needs to be realistic so as not to seem cheesy.

Much of this will depend on the features of the model. Some people show emotion better than others, whether it be an inviting smile or an intimidating scowl. But the key is finding how they display emotion. No two smiles are alike and every one can show something different.

Designers want natural looking images, so it is essential to make it look unforced. For photographers, coaxing out the best natural facial impressions and capturing them is a challenge, but look for it and it will be there.

A Look Back at the Last 5 Years in Social Media

Five years ago, YouTube (YouTube) was just getting started, MySpace was the most popular website in the U.S., and Facebook (Facebook) was still limited to college and high school students. Mobile was mostly an after-thought, as we were still more than a year away from the introduction of the iPhone and the idea of an app store. And “widgets” were just starting to emerge as a way to integrate third-party apps on a website (Newsweek would declare 2007 to be “year of the widget” in a late 2006 article).

Fast forward to today and the sites we use and the way we use them have shifted dramatically. Facebook is closing in on Google as the Web’s most trafficked site. There are hundreds of thousands of mobile applications that users access across a variety of smartphones, and social media is increasingly being consumed and produced on the go. And “Like” buttons have become the new form of social currency for publishers around the world.

How did we get to this point? Here’s a quick look back at the last five years in social media.

The News Feed Brings It All Together

In late 2006, Facebook introduced the news feed – a controversial concept at the time (incidentally, there are many parallels between it and Facebook’s most recent privacy issues) that has since become perhaps the most important and oft-imitated feature in social networking.

It’s hard to remember life before the news feed, but it consisted mostly of visiting your friend’s profiles, making wall comments and perhaps maintaining a photo gallery. For Facebook, this innovation (and a lack of innovation by then leading social network MySpace (MySpace)) is the one that established the service’s utility and has been at the heart of its expansion since — showing you at a glance what your friends are up to on Facebook and around the Web.

Nowadays, whether it’s Twitter (Twitter), Foursquare (Foursquare), Flickr (Flickr) or yes, MySpace, the experience very much centers around seeing the most recent updates from your friends, in reverse-chronological order.

Video Emerges as Social Media’s Perfect Compliment

A few months before the birth of Mashable (Mashable), YouTube made its debut on the Web in February 2005, making an unprecedented ascent into the mainstream consciousness. By December of that year, it had already become the most popular video site, and by July of 2006, it was serving 100 million video views per day (today, it serves more than 2 billion views daily). Then, in October, Google bought YouTube for a whopping $1.6 billion, just 18 months after the site launched.

At the end of last year, I declared YouTube the top social media innovation of the decade, as it has come to embody so much of what we now know as social media, from highly shareable content to citizen journalism to the ability of anyone with a camera to claim their 15 minutes of fame.

Social Networks Spread Their Wings

In early 2008, a new battle in the social media space emerged – the battle over portable identity. While OpenID had long promised a single sign-on for third-party websites, Facebook, MySpace and Google (Google) started to realize that your social networking profile had potential to be used as your identity across the Web, while at the same time enabling publishers to make their sites more social.

Facebook Connect emerged, as did Google Friend Connect and MySpaceID. Eventually, as Twitter’s popularity grew, they also got in the game. Today, Facebook Connect – which has evolved into the Facebook Open Graph – is used by hundreds of thousands of websites that can add simple copy and paste code to let their visitors “Like” stuff; “Likes” that are then pushed back into the Facebook News Feed. MySpace and Twitter ultimately hooked up with Google Friend Connect (google friend connect), which is now in use on some 9 million sites.

Mobile Makes Social Indispensible

While there’s been a running joke that it was going to be “the year of mobile” for about a decade, it’s only within the last few years that smartphone use has exploded, and along with it, use of social media while not in front of a computer.

According to data published earlier this year, 30% of smartphone users now access social networking sites from their phone’s web browser – and that doesn’t even take into account people who download apps on their iPhone (iPhone), Android (Android), BlackBerry (BlackBerry Rocks!) or other devices.

Thanks to increasing mobile broadband speeds, video is also going mobile. YouTube now serves up 100 million videos to mobile devices each day, and with more and more new phones offering video capture capabilities, we’re also seeing smartphones become an important part of content production.

What's Next?

Now that we’ve established where we are – a social ecosystem that’s moving beyond the walls of individual sites to mobile devices and third-party applications – the question is: what’s next?

Keywording Tips for Stock Photographers, Part 3: Some Keywords that Really Should be Forgotten

In our last Keywording Tips blog, we talked about some words that photographers tend to leave out of keyword lists that they should be including. In this blog, we’ll turn things around and talk about a few words that really should be left out of keyword lists.

Incidentals- Just because you can see something in a stock image, doesn’t mean that it needs to be in the keywords. Stock photography buyers who search on the word “trees” don’t want to have to wade through dozens of images that barely show a few trees in the background in order to find the images that show nothing but trees. A good rule of thumb is to only include a word in a keyword list if you would be happy seeing that image come up in a search for that word.

Wrong Information- Many stock photography buyers absolutely have to make sure that the information they have about an image is completely accurate for legal reasons, and they won’t buy an image unless they’re one hundred percent sure that the information in the caption and keywords is correct. Things like locations, scientific names of plants and animals, and ingredients in food are just a few of the facts that some buyers need to know are accurate. Don’t ever guess when you’re keywording stock images. When in doubt, leave it out!

Trademarks- It doesn’t happen often, but legal issues can arise out of trademarked terms in stock photography keywords. Common words like Band-Aid, Frisbee, Hula Hoop, Jacuzzi, Popsicle, Post-its, Q-tip, Rollerblade, and Tarmac are just a few examples of trademarked terms that are often found in keywords. Since it’s better to be safe than sorry, these terms should not be used as keywords.

When it comes to keywording stock images, more isn’t always better. Putting quality before quantity will help you get the best results from your stock images’ keywords.

Keywording Tips for Stock Photographers, Part 2: Don’t Forget the Basics

Welcome back to Part Two of our series on keywording tips for stock photographers. If you missed Part One, you can still check it out.

In order to help potential customers find your stock images, you’ll want to make sure that you describe certain things in the keywords for every image you submit to a stock photography site.

After much searching, the Glow Images Team has come up with the top three things that photographers should be including in keywords lists for stock images, but aren’t. Here they are, in no particular order:

People, Person, and Nobody- One thing most buyers of stock images definitely know is whether they want an image with or without people in it. Often they start browsing stock photography sites by searching on a simple word like “people,” “person,” or “nobody.” If you’re not including these words in your stock images’ keywords, then your images aren’t showing up in these searches.

Ages of People- Including accurate numerical ages (such as “30s,” “30-35 years,” etc.) is important when keywording stock images, but it’s also important to include more generic age-related terms for the customers who don’t consider the exact age of the models to be important. Words like “adult,” “child,” “teenager,” “middle-aged,” “senior,” and “mature,” along with other similar terms and synonyms, are all useful descriptors of age that stock photography buyers search on.

Ethnicity- Including the ethnicities of models can help your stock images show up in more search results. Many stock photography buyers are actively looking for images that showcase diversity, so you should also use keywords like “multicultural,” “multi-ethnic,” and “diversity” when applicable.

Make it easy for customers to find your stock images by keeping these three things in mind when you’re keywording your images for stock photography sites

Best Scenic Nature Locations for Photographers

There is no easy way to pick the most scenic nature locations for photographers. So much depends on the conditions. But hang around long enough and you will snap the perfect shot.

There is a moment when the light hits the landscape in just the right way, and you capture the scene exactly as you had pictured it. It’s a photographer’s dream!

Head over to our full blog to check out the full list!

Glow Adds Yet Another Collection

We are excited to announce that we have added the Gardenpix collection to our site.

Gardenpix is a rights managed collection of images from all different kinds of gardens and outdoor spaces. From sleek, modern flower gardens to old-fashioned country vegetable gardens, it’s all there. The collection features a variety of plants and flowers, as well as garden layouts and peaceful garden scenes.

So, check out Gardenpix! See how your own garden compares.

Glow Welcomes 3 New Collections

We are pleased to announce the addition of 3 great collections to the Glow Images website: PhotoAlto, ZenShui, and es Collection.

The PhotoAlto collection features stylish and creative imagery while still being modern and practical. The collection covers a wide variety of subjects and styles.

ZenShui is a beautifully blended mix of eastern aesthetics with western themes. It brings a Zen-like quality to everyday subject matter.

The es Collection is known for its avant-garde styles and content. The imagery is often conceptual and creatively captured.

These newly launched collections add to the site’s already diverse and high quality content. Check out the site and explore!

Keywording Tips for Stock Photographers, Part 1: Why Does Keywording Matter?

Photographers are artists, but when they’re submitting their images to microstock sites, they also have to learn the technical side of the industry, including how to accurately assign keywords to stock images. As a professional keyworder with nearly four years of experience in the stock photography industry, I know that the one thing most keyworders will agree on is that there’s a lot of grey area when it comes to keywording stock images.

So what are keywords, and why do they matter? Keywords are descriptive words assigned to an image so that it can be found in a collection of stock images. Keywords are the words that stock photo buyers will enter into a search engine in order to find your images. For example, if a searcher enters the word “dog” into a search engine, the search results will be all the images that have the word “dog” assigned as a keyword.

Keywords are arguably the most important part of a stock photography submission (not that I’m biased or anything) because they allow your images to show up in search results. In other words, keywords are what allow your images to be seen by potential buyers. Customers can’t buy stock images that they can’t find.

Since keyword quality is directly related to sales, savvy photographers need to understand how to maximize the impact of their stock images’ keywords (and therefore, maximize their sales revenue).

In the coming weeks, the Glow Images blog will feature more articles exploring the ins and outs of keywording for stock photography. Keep checking back to find out how you can turn keywords into your stock images’ best assets!