Checking out Pixabay

If you have checked out my previous work you would know that I do a lot of composite images. If you don't know what that is a composite image is when someone combines different photographs usually in Photoshop to create a new image.

You can see an example of my composite work here:https://steemit.com/artexplosion/@wildempress/art-explosion-week-30-deviance-entry

I have always shot my own images to use in composite, and until joining Steemit I had never even heard of Pixabay. Since many people are not photographers they need to source their images legally through websites like Pixabay which offers images free of copyright for people to use, even commercially.

So I spent the morning browsing through images, seeing what there was that I could potentially use in composite images.
Here are two images I found on Pixabay today, can you guess which one I like better?
![goslar-451603.jpg](

If you guessed the archway you would be right! I liked the nighttime shot of the castle, but unless my subject is going to be flying this won't work for composite images. There is no ground to place a person, in fact the bottom of the image is blurry with people moving about, I would have to remove all that and it would create a lot of work in Photoshop. While the lighting probably wouldn't be too hard to match, an even blank type of lighting such as the second picture gives me much more flexibility. I could make that one look like evening if I wanted to, but the reverse is not true for the nighttime shot of the castle, it would be impossible...at least at my skill level to make that look like daytime.

I also found this PNG file of lamp posts. This was a golden find. Most of the work was done for me, as a PNG file has a transparent background. I don't have to waste an hour selecting/masking out a lamp if I want one! I was super stoked about that find. Come to think of it after I am done this post I might go check and see if I can search up just PNG files and see whats there!

Mostly I was looking for background locations. As a single mom I am a little busy (and broke) to be travelling the world getting great location pictures for my images. One day hopefully I will do that, but for now this seems like a really great compromise in the meantime.

So like I mentioned I look for specific things, even lighting, or lighting I know I can match. Unedited images are my preference, there were some that looked like they had matte, or color edits done on them and its just a pain to try and take that off or even try to match their artistic twist. I look for fairly simple angles, that look I could easily pop a person in and it would look natural.

For this one I can imagine a person leaning over the water, which would mean I would have to shoot from slightly above, but that's totally fine as long as I know that going into it.

So overall I am excited to give it a try and see how it comes out. I usually license my images for book covers, and I will have to check with them if they will accept things that have elements that are available as creative commons elsewhere...I am guessing it's probably a no...maybe depending on how edited and recognizable the images are... not sure, but if that is the case and I cannot submit them than I probably will not use it that much. But for my own personal projects that I have throughout the year...like I make my kids valentines to hand out to their classamates, Redbubble stuff or maybe contests here on steemit...those kinds of things... it could work very nicely.

These images were all sourced from Pixabay.
Be prepared to see some of these images in future posts. Or will you even be able to recognize them?

So guys do you use Pixabay? Any other sites you love for creative commons images? I'd love to hear your thoughts!!