“An image worth a thousand words,” that’s what they always said. In such a bustling generation, words don’t really mean a thing to those who are too impatient to sit down and read. While words seem to be old-fashion, images could still fulfill their purpose without a doubt. Just admit it, images are more appealing to people more than words, just like how people always judge a book by its cover. While words allow you to imagine an image in your head, images speak louder and more than words.
While you use images to tell stories, do you really have the rights to use them? Of course…not always. Using images without attribution is like violating the academic honesty. Little did I know, using any of the images I found on Google after a simple click could be an action of invading one’s intellectual property. . However, I was never able to find the perfect image that grants me the rights to use and satisfies me at the same time. For instance, I would just become super cloudy (or even rainy sometimes…who knows) when I’m not allowed to use an “all right reserved” image even if it’s exactly the one I’m looking for. And even if I found an image on flickr, it’s just irritating to hyperlink everything for the attribution…why is life so hard?
Right before you close the tab and want to give up on reading, please wait! I’ll stop ranting about image attributions. 🙁 Instead, shall we take a look at some incredibly mesmerizing images?
The Art of Images
While nothing seems to be similar between images and languages, they do share the simplest similarity — there could always be a deeper meaning beneath the surface. If everything in the world is literal, how much fun would we miss? I mean, just look at this image, isn’t it literally only a girl with her eyes closed? While I can literally talk about analyzing and seeking for a more figurative meaning behind everything, you’d never know what I’m truly thinking, just like how you might never know if I’m being ironic or not. Poets and musicians do the same, don’t they?
While I always question about the existence of human-beings, I often contemplate about life, perhaps too often sometimes as I get lost in my thoughts. What’s the most beautiful moment in life? Birth, youth, or death? Before you burn your entire brain to find the answer, chill, there isn’t a correct answer for such question.
An image with a woman with her eyes closed is nothing special, but as its photographer titled it “Forever young”, things seem to twist a little, and this is where the power of captions kicks in. This image represents the most beautiful moment in life since none of us really knows what is happening in this image. With an undefined answer, the title of the image “Forever young” inspired me and appeared to be a reference of a K-pop group called Bangtan Boys (BTS). Youth, to them, is undoubtedly the most beautiful moment in life as they named two of their extended plays The Most Beautiful Moment in Life, in which both EPs focused on the concept of youth. To me, youth is indeed the most beautiful in life as well (so far), thus we captioned this image “the most beautiful moment in life“. Just like images, there is always something beyond the scenes in terms of music. ♪
“The Most Beautiful Moment in Life”
Photo credit: Forever young by Dade Freeman via Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
As we are living through and celebrating the most beautiful moment in life, some might had suffered or are suffering through this process. The LGBTQ community has been more widely accepted nowadays. However, even just about years ago, LGBTQs weren’t even respected by the world due to possible misconceptions or different views on life. Troye Sivan is more than a singer or musician, he’s a proud advocate. As he gained fame as a YouTuber, he started to advocate for other LGBTQs as he came out publicly. Everyone has their own way to celebrate their most beautiful moment in life, and Sivan chose to stand out for the ones who has been through the same agony with him. His songs are not only inspirational music, but also songs that could affect someone for a lifetime. ? As a singer, an artist, an artist, and most importantly, as himself, he’s always celebrating youth and pride with his talents and heart.
You lost a part of your existence in the war against yourself.
The Fault in Our Stars, Troye Sivan
“Pride”
Photo credit: JTork via Visual hunt / CC BY-NC-ND
Musicians and composers are artists. They incorporate their feelings and affection in their lyrics and music. Music is able to reach the very bottom of your heart. Some non K-pop fans always stereotypically think that the world of K-pop is all about visuals. Well, not trying to start a fan war, but while appearance is important and can gain you tons of fans, talent and attitude are essential to keep your fans around. BTS is one of my favorite K-pop groups not because of their songs, looks, and talents, but also because of the concepts of their music and their precious attitude. Yoongi, also known as Suga as his stage name, is not my bias in the group, but is truly a prodigy behind the masterpieces created by BTS. As artists, BTS is also celebrating their youth as a group as well as with their fans.
“Prodigy”
Photo credit: BTS SUGA by 방탄킬러 via flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Beyond the scenes, there’s much more for us to discover. Not only in terms of art, but also in music and words. Musicians and lyricists are artists that paint their portrait of thoughts in their songs in order to intrigue and share it to the world.
In this generation, appearance causes us to become judgemental towards anything without much consideration. That’s also why visually attractive images are so extensively used in the modern-day society. Indeed, people are biased and thoughts do emerge right after you spot something, and we don’t really analyze and interpret the things we see in life a lot. While such fact couldn’t be changed, we, the authors of posts, can change ourselves by using images that are appealing, high-quality, and related to topic to make our posts interesting. Most importantly, it’s also important to have an eye on the copyright of the images.
While the images themselves could be interesting, captions could ✨spark✨ the images and could extend the readers’ imagination. While captioning these images, I didn’t tend to over-explain things since I always have thought it’d be fun to keep some imagination to the readers. Each caption surrounds a concept that is related to the artist(s). I then found out the magic of captions and fell in love with it. The relationship between image and captions is like bow and arrow, they exist for each other and make a perfect match.
Wanna gain Instagram followers? Add some interesting captions to your aesthetically pleasing images!
Thank y’all for keeping up with me, give yourself a round of applause first before I give you some tips on image attributions:) *YES, FINALLY SOME USEFUL INFORMATION* While it seems to be complicated, image attribution is wayyyy easier compared to MLA citations! (a moment of relief for those who drown in research papers) Image attribution is simply made up with 4 parts: title, author, source, and license. Before using an image, be aware of the right to use it! If you are a lazy person like me , try Visual Hunt! You literally just need to type some key words, click search, and BOOM, you got the images you have the right to use and are licensed! The best part is, it’s a sweet friend of yours and does the image attribution for you! (Note: this is totally not an ad for Visual Hunt)
What I really want to say is, images do speak louder than words even though language can evoke more feelings sometimes in my opinion. In this society, we are all finding a way to show and give off the best of us to the world. So, why not start with an interesting blog post and play around with some images?