The Search for Stock Photos
You need pictures - for your website, for your publications, for your promotion, for your family life, for your friends. A picture is worth a thousand words - But how to find the right picture? How to find the best picture for a specific situation?
The web is now loaded with lots of online photo galleries. Offers of new stock photography are popping up all the time.
This guide will help you to find really valuable stock photo resources as I have been following the development in new stock photography for decades and publish Stock Photo News.
Stock Photography - what's that?
What is the difference between royalty-free stock photos and licensed stock photography?
Stock photography is a great way to get professional looking pictures for your applications.The stock photography is offered on different conditions:
Royalty-free stock photos have become increasingly popular, because it is so easy to handle them. You pay for each royalty-free stock photo one unit price to get a digital picture file of a certain size.
Here is an overview of what kind of applications different sizes of picture files can be used for: Sizes of stock photos
What makes roylty-free stock photos easy to handle is:
- They come prepared (=optimized) for publications
- You can use them as many times and for whatever you want to use them for.
Licensed stock photos (often called traditional licensed stock photos) are different. Here you order a specific photo to be used in a specific way. It could be as a cover picture of a life style magazine with a print run of say 50.000 copies.
The advantages of licensed stock photos are
- You can get a track record of the previous use of the stock photo, e.g. that it hasn't been used previously for a cover of a life style magazine.
- Such photos are normally used for more serious applications.
Recommended Stock Photography Resources:
- Get Stock Photo News
- Be kept informed about the stock photography business and get tips and tricks about how to use pictures in your marketing.
- Stock Photography explained at Wikipedia
- Definitions of stock photography.
- Stock Photography at A-Z Fotos
- Stock photography from many countries in high resolution.
- Stock Photography at Age FotoStock
- One of the most creative and professional international picture agencies.
- Stock Photography at Alamy
- Alamy is the biggest and greatest online international stock photo agency of the world with 10 millions online stock photos in its picture database, covering everything, and as traditional licenced stock photography and as royalty-free stock photos.
Useful resources from Amazon
The Digital Photography Book
Amazon Price: $13.59 (as of 10/06/2008)
The Digital Photography Book, Volume 2
Amazon Price: $16.49 (as of 10/06/2008)
The Betterphoto Guide to Digital Photography (Amphoto Guide Series)
Amazon Price: $16.47 (as of 10/06/2008)
More Stock Photography Resources:
Stock Photography Websites and Picture Databases
- Online Photo Sharing
- Where to find good options for sharing photos online.
- Stock Photo Search Intry
- Another intro to stock photography search.
- iStock Photo - Stock photography
- Big picture database of stock photography.
- Foto Search for Stock Photography Agencies
- Links to many othere websites.
- Stock Photos Online - Stock Photography from several sources.
- Short intro to finding stock photos.
Leave Your Feedback - Along with a Link to Your Own Lenses
|
surfsusan
Fine informative lens. a 5 start performance. I use a lot of phots on my lenses, so this lens is useful for me. Posted March 13, 2008 |
