Selecting Your Images
You can always tell the websites that want to be big, but
aren't. How? By the sheer number of stock photographs (or
images) plastered all over the design. If you've ever been to a
business' website and seen one of those ubiquitous photos of a
guy in a suit or a woman smiling and wearing a headset, you'll
know what I mean. Before you venture into the world of stock
photography for yourself, there are a few things you need to
know.
How Stock Photography Works
Stock photography companies have libraries of photographs that
they believe will be useful in graphic design. If you're
starting a site about tennis, for example, you'll no doubt be
able to find stock photos of tennis balls, tennis players,
tennis courts, and so on - all of which can be integrated into
your design. The photographs broadly fall into three categories:
landscapes (including landmarks), objects, and models (people
posing in a particular way).
There are two types of stock photography: royalty-based, and
royalty-free. In royalty-based stock photography, you pay a
small fee each time you use an image - a part of this fee will
go to the company, part to the photographer, and often part to
the model (if any). For the royalty-free version, you pay one
flat up-front fee and get a license to re-use the image as many
times as you want.
Unfortunately, when stock photography is used on the web, it
pretty much has to be royalty-free: there's just no way of
tracking use in a way that would create a sensible royalty
structure. This means that stock photography for the web is
typically very expensive: you basically have to buy a permanent
license for an image you only want to use once. This, in turn,
forces people towards lower-end, cheaper stock photos, which is
how we all end up with uninspiring pictures of some guy in a
suit.
Is It Worth It?
In most cases, then, stock photography on the web simply isn't
worth it, at least when it comes from the established companies.
You can pay absolutely hundreds of dollars and end up with
images that aren't exactly anything to write home about. If
you're a big corporation and you're planning to use the same
image for a year, then perhaps - but even then it's unlikely.
Look at it this way: not only are you going to end up paying an
absolute premium to use relatively mediocre images on your site,
but all your competitors will have easy access to the same ones
too, and might even use them without noticing.
There are plenty of sites on the web devoted to tracking how
often stock photos turn up in different contexts. Magazines
regularly have to send ads back to advertisers because two ads
have ended up using the same stock photo for wildly different
products? Wouldn't you be embarrassed to have some site circle
that girl you put next to 'friendly customer service' and then
present their visitors with the same picture playing all sorts
of roles at other sites? I know I would be.
Cheaper Stock Photos
Instead of jumping on the stock photo bandwagon, then, the much
better alternative is this: do it yourself! In most cases, you
can create stock photos that are just as good as, if not better
than, the stock ones. Why pay $100 for a picture of a pencil
when you have a digital camera and a pencil of your own?
If you don't have access to the thing you want to photograph,
though (you don't own that object, or live near that place),
then an excellent alternative is to go looking for appealing
amateur photography. If you look around, you'll find people with
great photos who are willing to let you use them, often in
exchange for nothing more than a credit and a link back.
Alternatively, you can use stock photography sites that aren't
big and 'established', but are more like groups of enthusiasts,
doing it because they like to and charging minimal prices to get
their work out there. Take a look at istockphoto.com, for
example, where many photos are only $1.