What Is Stock Photography?
And How Can It Help You?
What is Stock Photography?
Open up any magazine and flip through it, looking at the pictures. Unless it is a picture of a specific product being advertised or a specific person that was photographed as part of an article or ad, it is a stock photograph. Do the same for websites. As you can see 95% of all images used for commercial purposes (and to a lesser degree for editorial) are stock photographs.
Stock photography originated back in a time when cameras were much rarer and professional photographers even more so. If you needed an image for your article, you could hire a photographer to come take a picture, which took a lot of money or time, or you could buy one from a stock agency for (probably) less money and certainly less time.
What About Microstock?
In today’s world, with web pages increasing the need for images a thousand-fold and the proliferation of digital cameras, the landscape of stock photography has changed. But the basis is still the same. If someone needs a picture of a plate of fried chicken, they can hire a professional food photographer to shoot it, or they can buy one online at one of the new eras of stock agencies called micro-stock.
