Adventures in Stock Photo Search

Most of you have never had the thrill of perusing stock photography. I occasionally use stock photos and graphics on my hobby website, and I've been redesigning my home page this week.

When you visit the stock image websites, you do a keyword search. The entertaining part of the process is seeing what shows up. I searched for "women at a table," and one of my results was "woman with cell phone and potatoes." Why is she all dressed up to cut potatoes? The pearls, Mildred. Really?

I searched for "large table and chair" and got "woman in her bra with a glass of whiskey." I see neither a large table nor a chair in that photo. Very amusing to see it among a thousand otherwise mundane results though.

I don't pay more than $10 for stock images. There are sites that charge anywhere from nothing to thousands of dollars. My best tip is to stick with the completely free sites like morguefile and stock.xchg. They may not have exactly what you want, and frequently the visual impact isn't great, but you can crop many of those images to make something really nice. Select a table and chairs photo, but crop in close to one chair and the corner of the table for a simpler look. Or use a photo of a person whose expression may not be right for your project, but crop in very close to part of their face. Cropping is your friend.

There are also inexpensive options like CanStockPhoto or dreamstime, where fabulous images can start at less than a dollar each, for a small version.

Whatever you do, don't search Google for an image or graphic and just copy it for your website, brochure, etc. That would be illegal and people do come after you, as they should. Having designed several logos and graphics, even as the hack that I am in that area, I would be all over someone who was using them as part of their own website. Check licenses to see what you can legally do with any image you obtain, even ones you purchase. There are rules that dictate whether or not you can edit an image, if you must credit the artist/photographer or the website where you found the image, etc.

If you're a hobby photographer, check out the stock photo sites for information on how to sell your photos. If your photos are good, you can make some easy money!

The "elated squirrel with bread" wishes you all a happy Tuesday.