At the heart of editorial photography is illustration. Illustration of a mood, a place, a city, a flower or whatever it might be, to complement a magazine article, book chapter, brochure, etc. To successfully illustrate, a picture professional benefits by knowing as much as they can about the particular subject. As you know, this is a powerful confirmation of the advantages of specializing, and you've no doubt experienced that it's a lifelong process to continually add to your knowledge in your special interest areas.

But sometimes knowing a lot about a topic or area isn't quite enough. Sometimes your imagination, not only your knowledge, can be your most useful tool.

These days, there is help available to get those creative juices flowing, swiftly and cheaply, and it’s right at your fingertips. Search engines are fast becoming the researcher’s most powerful idea tool.

If you find that you are running low on new creative ideas, browsing the work of others might be just the thing you need. In the past this would require a trip to the library and countless hours flipping through books and magazines.

These days, all you need to do to browse the work of hundreds, if not thousands, of photographers and other illustrators, is to fire up your computer, get online and let a search engine such as Google work it's magic.

Go to www.google.com and select the "Images Tab". Then key in whatever special area/topic you want to explore. Click "Search" and you'll soon see what I mean. You will encounter a huge number of images from all corners of the earth.

"Is this legal?" you ask.

Finding inspiration from the work of others is not illegal or morally wrong. (Unless you downright copy what you see, of course.) To browse the work of other photographers, painters, peers, to find inspiration, is not only perfectly O.K., it's also a great way to get your creativity kicked into high gear.

Study what others have produced. Think about how you would improve their concept or their images. Observe the symbols that were used. Try to understand the concepts that were incorporated in the production of the various images. This whole process can help you come up with new fresh ideas.

While in the past it was common to say that inspiration was lurking just around the corner, these days it might be more fitting to say that inspiration is waiting for you just within your next Web-search.

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Photojournalist Mikael Karlsson has 18 years' experience of working for magazines and newspapers in more than 30 countries. He moved to the United States in 1998 from his native Sweden. He lives in Nebraska and is currently US correspondent for 11 Swedish magazines and a regular contributor to a wide variety of U.S. publications. Reach him at mike@photosource.com.

Popular search engines, such as Google, add and update new sites to their index each time they "crawl" the web. For example, Google invites you to submit your Web page’s URL. They don’t add all submitted URLs to their index, and they cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when your website would be indexed. But it’s worth giving it a try. To add your website to Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl.

Want to add your URL to other search engines for free? Go to: http://www.submitexpress.com/submit.html.

Also (for free) submit your site to the Open Directory: http://dmoz.org/add.html.

Note: Here at PhotoSource we have added the PhotoSourceBANK to all of the major search engines. Depending which search engine is your favorite, if you are a PhotoSourceBANK member, type in a keyword or key phrase in the search bar of your favorite search engine, a space, then the word Photosource. If your page reference does not come up, try another search engine. There are many besides Google: Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, MSN, Yahoo! etc. RE

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