Expert: LizaL - 6/23/2005

Question
Hi Liza,

I'm looking for a good resource for stock photos.  Unfortunately I can't spend a lot of money on these photos.  This project is one that I am funding myself as a promotion, and I need to keep expenses as low as possible.  

Any ideas?  Do you use stock photos?

Thanx,

Trey

Answer
Hi Trey,

A good place to start is iStockPhoto.com:
http://istockphoto.com/

Their prices are unbelievable -- $1 for low-res, $2, for medium, and $3 for high-res. Plus, they're royalty-free! I can also personally vouch for this site and their photography. A very good client of mine uses them all the time, and has asked that I use certain pictures she's gotten from there in some of the work we do together. And the images turn out great!

A couple of other resources are Turbo Photo:
http://www.turbophoto.com/products.htm

Here you can buy collections of stock photos on CD for varying prices; not free, but fairly cheap. I think you can download some free samples, though, to see if you like their style, and more importantly, their quality.

I don't honestly know about this site, Image*After:
http://www.imageafter.com/

If you check out the "fine print" at the top of the page, in the peach-colored bar, it says "non polished images an textures" -- huh?! Not being familiar with this site I'd say it's submissions from the general public, and it appears to be free. But I guess the old saying "let the buyer beware" holds true here!

Of course if the budget ever allows, you can always go to some of the bigger, more-established stock houses such as Comstock (http://www.comstock.com/web/default.asp) and Image Bank, which is now Getty Images (http://creative.gettyimages.com/source/search/AdvancedImageSearch.aspx). I used to use these guys when I was a magazine art director. They're not free, and most of the time not cheap, but they do have some killer images.

To answer your last question, I use stock photos if my clients need for me to use them. Other than that, I rarely need to. I do a lot of Web work, and I might use stock sometimes in setting up prototypes of Web sites, but my work these days doesn't call for a lot of stock photography. But if I needed to purchase a stock photo, the first place I'd go would be istockphoto.com.

Hope this helps!

Lisa