Photo credit Windsor Tennis Club Belfast, licence here
Before getting into this article, see the photo above and the credit below it. We’ll be talking about that.
You need photos for your tennis marketing right? For website, flyers, posters, Facebook etc. Needless to say, you don’t want to be just downloading them from Google as you might end up in hot water for copyright infringement. So here are some ways you can get great photos for free……..
Take Your Own
The preferable method – it’s free, you don’t have to worry about your rights to use them (providing you get permission from players/parents) and who wants to see obvious stock photos? Much better to use real pictures of people actually enjoying your sessions.
When people sign up to your program, do you get them to tick a box giving permission for photos to be taken of them or their children? If not, I recommend that you do.
Once you have consent, you can regularly take photos of your sessions.
Tip!
Offer a free group coaching session where people give permission for themselves or their kids to be photographed. Get them to sign something up front to give their permission for the photos to be used on any marketing materials. Then have a friend who is a photographer come along to take photos.
Flickr Creative Commons
Flickr Creative Commons is a part of the photo sharing site Flickr. It’s brilliant! There are millions of photos, but they do have different levels of ‘licenses’ – from full copyright (which you can’t use), to licenses with certain conditions (e.g. you can’t use for commercial purposes or modify) to photos that you can use in almost any way – providing you give credit. See the picture at the top and the one here for examples.
Photo credit Stevan Sheets, license here
There is a great article HERE which goes into lots of detail about Flickr, types of licenses and how to credit – but here is a very quick guide from me, using the photos above as an example:
- Go to Flickr Creative Commons
- Search for what you want in the search box at the top, e.g. “tennis” or “kids tennis” – be creative there.
- Under license, change to what you want, e.g. ‘commercial use allowed’.
4. Click on the photo, download it.
5. Give credit and link to the license. I’ve done both in the examples above. Please ask questions in the comments for more details.
Other methods
This same article I mentioned earlier lists lots of other sites where you can find free photos, and some useful tips and online tools. However, the 2 methods I’ve listed above may be the only things you ever need for your photos.