Stock Photography Site
What are “stock photography sites” actually? Basically, you could say that they are market places to buy and sell images, or better said, licenses to use said images. Imagine you build a website for a client, you want to be sure to select great images that make the site stand out. You go to a web site that offers such images as stock photography, means you don’t “buy” an image, you buy the license to use it. The person who created the image, is paid a share of the price as royalties. As there are an unlimited amount of image licenses available, the same image can continue to produce income for years to come for its creator. That is why it is called “stock photography”, the photos are “in stock” in the library, ready to be used, against a fee. Stock photography sites before the computer and digital age meant printed catalogs being sent around, slides on file and being send out on demand and against payment. Stock photography in those days was slow and expensive. And it was also exclusive for the few selected photographers.
The digital age with internet, fact broadband, digital cameras and instant payment possibilities has changed that all. Nowadays everybody with a decent digital camera can try his or her hand on stock photography and everybody can now afford to buy cheap stock images for his or her website or blog.
There are a lot of “old”, established photographers around that have difficulties to adapt to the new price structure that has developed and that regret that decrease in royalty / image deeply. Others have adapted to the new market and started to produce images targeted for this kind of online image libraries whilst maintaining a client base for custom shoots and traditional rights-managed stock photography.
For the customers, the image buyers, this has let to the situation of having a large amount of images to select from at very reasonable prices. Now every small business that can afford having a website, can also afford of having great images on the website without paying hundreds of dollars for the right to use it!
And a third group has profited from this digital evolution, the so-called amateur photographers. Whilst it was incredibly difficult to get accepted into one of the traditional stock photography image libraries, it is now far easier to get accepted into their online / digital counter parts. Crowd sourcing has entered the world of photography and taken it by storm!
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