Okay, so yesterday I was messing around, trying to find some cool pictures of Cyndi Lauper. You know, for a little mood board I’m working on.
First thing I did was just hit up Google Images, right? Typed in “cyndi lauper photos” and bam! Tons of stuff. But most of it was just the same old publicity shots. Needed something a bit more… raw, I guess?
Then I remembered Flickr! Went there, searched the same thing. Actually found a few gems from concerts back in the day. Some fan shots, you know? Not super high quality, but they had that real, authentic vibe I was looking for.
Started downloading a bunch, then realized I was going to drown in duplicates. So, spent a good hour or so just sorting through them, deleting the blurry ones, the ones that were too similar, etc. It was a total pain, but worth it in the end.
Next up, I tried Pinterest. Man, that place is a rabbit hole! Ended up finding a bunch of fan-made collages and mood boards already. Some of them were actually pretty good! Saved a few of those for inspiration.
One thing I kept noticing was that the really good photos were often buried in blog posts or old news articles. So, I started digging around on some music blogs I know. That’s where I struck gold! Found a couple of really cool shots from a small club show she did in the 80s. Super grainy, but awesome.
After all that digging, I had a pretty decent collection. But the colors were all over the place. Some were too saturated, some were too washed out. So, I fired up Photoshop and did some quick color correction on the ones I really liked.
Finally, I had my final selection! Uploaded them to my mood board project and… boom! Looked amazing. It was a long process, but I’m really happy with how it turned out.
Lesson learned: Don’t just rely on Google. Get out there and dig! Flickr, Pinterest, old blog posts… that’s where the real treasure is hidden.
