PowerPoint Tip: Government Photos You can Use

In almost every workshop that I do, someone asks where you can get great photos to use in your presentation.  I always mention Microsoft’s online library of images that is accessible through PowerPoint, stock photography sites such as istockphoto.com and pictures you take yourself.  Today I’d like to discuss another source that is available free of charge in most cases.

Governments have staff who take photographs as part of their jobs, and many times these photos are quite good.  Fortunately, these photos also belong to the government and the various departments and agencies have generously made a lot of these photos available for use without charge.  You do have to read their licensing terms, but it normally just asks that you include a short source description at the bottom of your slide in small font.  Here is a photo of a sunrise in Alaska from the NOAA Photo Library listed below (taken by Commander John Bortniak, NOAA Corps).

The availability of these photos varies from country to country, and today I’ll use the US government as the example of one that offers a vast collection online.  Let’s look at some of the sites and what they offer.

Bureau of Land Management (http://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en/bpd.html) – amazing scenery photos with a search by state and keyword available; includes some photos of people engaged in activities such as white-water rafting; this pages has links to other government photo sites as a bonus

U.S. Department of the Interior (http://www.doi.gov/photos/gallery.html) – wide selection of topics including aerial photographs (some require payment) to photos of national parks, monuments and historical sites

U.S. Geological Survey (http://gallery.usgs.gov/) – in addition to photos, also includes videos; collections include climate change, geology, people at work, native activities and more

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (http://www.photolib.noaa.gov) – amazing photos of coastlines, aquatic animals, weather and more

How can you use these photos?  Here are just a few ideas.  Obviously if you are speaking about the environment or talking about an environmental aspect of your topic, these photos could be used.  If you want to illustrate a point by using an analogy to weather or a particular animal, these photos can make the point visually.  When speaking about a particular place, you could include a photo of a well-known location that is close-by to give your audience context.  And if you want to show people at work, some of these photos will be just what you need.

Photos are one of the powerful ways to communicate our ideas.  We can use the sources that we usually use, and we can add great public domain photos like the ones on the sites above to enhance our message.  Check out these photos, bookmark the sites and discover the photos that governments make available for no charge.

I was inspired by this blog post on using PowerPoint as a photo editor instead of Photoshop. The demo is shown in PowerPoint 2007 and the one aspect of the instructions that I was intrigued about was when he showed how to convert a rectangle to a set of points and then curve the sides. Unfortunately, you can’t do that in PowerPoint 2003 because it does not have the feature of converting a shape to points.

So I started playing with the tools that PowerPoint 2003 does have to see if I could achieve the same result. It turns out that you can create a rectangle and bend the sides to create a new shape. Here’s a quick screen capture video that shows how (click here if you can't access YouTube).

With the technique of automatically closing a freeform shape, you can create pretty much any shape you want. Then, by converting the points to corner points, you can use the Bezier curves to create new shapes that are more visually interesting.  It allows you to create a shape that could visually represent a different step in a process or distinguish the shape from a similar one in a diagram. Try it out and see how it works for you.