Sometimes you search, but you happily find what you weren't looking for.

image courtesy of Bill Gracey

I started this with a purpose and instead found another.

I had thought about writing a post about my neighborhood, Quail Creek.  I thought I'd give some neighborhood facts and stats and just talk about how much I enjoy living here.  So, as I do with most posts I write, I thought about what photo I would use to lead the text.  I have some photos from my neighborhood on my laptop, but most of them are of my house and I didn't really want to show anyone how well I did at killing the grass this year during the drought, so I went with my second method of finding photos - Flickr.com.  I love looking through the photos, but its their search feature that really provides quality images.  And not just any images, but images you may not have thought of until you search for a specific string of words and see what Flickr pulls up for you.

How I search for my photos.

When I get to Flickr, I immediately hit the "search" button and then follow that with the "advanced search" (one of these days I'll be smart enough to bookmark this page and eliminate a few steps).  Once on the advanced search screen I type in a few words that define what I'm looking for.  For my neighborhood I went with the obvious - "Quail Creek."  I always start off obvious, because the results sometimes are spectacular and fit your post perfectly.  I also check the box at the bottom "Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content." These are people who are willing to share these photos and allow you to use them.  If you don't know about Creative Commons licensing, I suggest you read up on it, its a blogger's best friend.  I always credit the photographer in my post and include a link to their photostream - everyone loves a friendly link back.

So I searched for Quail Creek and found the photo above.

I'm sure you can guess, that that's not my neighborhood.  Its actually Quail Creek State Park in Utah.  I never heard of it before, but some of the photos are absolutely incredible.  So today, thanks to Flickr, I enjoyed some great photos of a place I've never been and was able to write a post about how to use Flickr to find great photos that sum up your blog post.  Sometimes looking will find you things you never expected and bring something new to the table.  So go ahead, start searching and see what you can find.