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Semi OT; what is the purpose of stock photography?

TSasha SmithTSasha Smith Posts: 27,432
in The Commons

I know that there are sites that have stock photography.  They claim to be royalty free but what is it used for? I know that it is not for 3D work but is it for website making?  Or traditional art?  I am confused about what stock photography is used for?

Comments

  • JamesJABJamesJAB Posts: 1,766

    Lets say that you need a picture of a fruit bowl for your website....

    It will cost you a small fortune to hire a photography studio to set up and shoot the shot just for you.  Or say you need a photo of the Empire State Building, purchasing a stock photo will save lots of money vs. flying to NY and taking the photo yourself.
    Or the savings from using a stock photo might have nothing to do with the money.  It could be a mater of not having the free time to go and take the photos yourself.

    Reasons to use stock photography:
    *Lack of Photography equipment or skills
    *Time
    *Money
    *Lazy
    *Lack of access to subject material

  • SBibbSBibb Posts: 600

    Stock photography gets heavily used in book cover design, advertising, and having images for blogs.

     

    The terms depend on the individual site, but it usually allows a license of paying once to use an image for a certain number of printed or digital copies, at which point you need to repurchase the license or upgrade. It often doesn't allow for merchandise such as t-shirts or mugs without an extended liscence (more costly, but takes into account that the image may be the primary reason a person is buying that merchandise), but works great for marketing (such as book covers, to attract the right readers to stories that would interest them).

  • HavosHavos Posts: 5,630

    I use them a lot for one of my apps, which is a picture guessing game. In each picture pack there is a mixture of photos and renders, and whilst I can download and resize an appropriate photo in a few minutes, a render can take several hours to set up and prepare, so stock photography is easier. I tend to use renders for a lot of the stuff involving people, as a lot of the royality free sites (particularly the free ones) do not include model rights (or at least it does not say, so you have to assume there is none). One site I subscribe to states if model rights is included on each photo.

  • outrider42outrider42 Posts: 3,679
    edited April 2019
    It has the same purpose as buying assets for Daz Studio. You know you could make everything you buy for Daz yourself. So look at it that way. A lot of advertisements and websites use stock photos. If you look you might even recognize some of the people being used in the pictures as being in others.

    Maybe this isn't so surprising, but there are Reddit threads dedicated to spotting some of the people who do lots of stock photos. Some people who posed for stock photos are all over the place. One of the most famous is a is woman known as Ariane. This woman has appeared in countless ads and websites, and she has even been on the cover of some magazines! And these are all stock photos. It seems she has made a bit of a secondary career out of selling her stock photos, just like a number of PAs here sell their products. Actually, I'm surprised a likeness of her hasn't shown up here, she has a nice big smile.

    I found an article about her, and it offers a little incite to why she does it, and why she only does stock photos. https://www.womensrunning.com/2015/10/just-for-fun/the-worlds-most-famous-fitness-model-youve-never-heard-of_47395
    Post edited by outrider42 on
  • AscaniaAscania Posts: 1,855

    Marketing brochures, ads, flyers, presentations, magazine articles and editorials, mock-ups... if you need a photograph for something you can get a stock one for it. They are cheaper, faster and require less work.

    If you're publishing a (common food) receipe and want a visual presentation to go with it you can either get some cook and presentation artist together with a photographer go cook it and set it up to look good in a photograph and have it photographed, which costs a lot in money and time, or you can shell out a lot less money and get a stock photograph of the same dish that looks really appealing.

    If you're writing an article about the oil industry and want some eye-catching header you can either scout for the right thing to represent it in a good location, get all the permissions, send a photographer and hope the weather is game. Or you browse the stock photo libraries for some images of a refinery or oil well and buy one of those to use.

    If you're preparing a PowerPoint for C-level about the going-ons in the international fruit market you can buy some stock photos of appealing apples, kiwis and melons and photoshop them together to have some nice visual cues and counterpoints to the text. Or you go without and risk losing their attention, because you have no budget to actually hire a photographer to photograph some fruit for you in a way that doesn't look totally shite.

  • plasma_ringplasma_ring Posts: 1,027

    I use them all the time for render compositing, too. If I just need a nice lens-blurred background, I'm gonna drop a stock photo behind my character in Photoshop instead of trying to set up and render out an entire environment. 

  • SixDsSixDs Posts: 2,384

    I don't use them a lot, but occasionally I have used them for backgrounds, for pose references and just as inspiration and references for other 3D work. Other uses that I know of, in addition to those already mentioned, include the bases for digital painting, and photo-manipulation and compositing, both of which seem to be popular.

  • benniewoodellbenniewoodell Posts: 2,000
    Some movies and TV shows use stock video for establishing shots and such. I had to comb through a bunch of footage of Mullholand Drive for a network show I worked on a couple years ago.
  • srieschsriesch Posts: 4,243

    I assume stock photography is used in textbooks as well.  My favorite apparent bad use of stock photography was a textbook that had a visual diagram showing how a computer network operates.  There was a little picture of a computer, then a line to some telephone poles that marched up the page, then a picture of a satellite dish, then a little jagged zigzag lighting bolt icon going up into the sky implying radio wave transmission, then it went through a picture of the hubble space telescope, then another jagged lightning bold back down to another recieving satellite dish and a matching set of telephone poles to the final computer icon.  Apparently somebody needed a stock photo of a satellite, but was not aware of the differences between communications satellites and orbiting telescopes.

  • cdpro_2831bbd990cdpro_2831bbd990 Posts: 1,430
    benniewoodell said:
    Some movies and TV shows use stock video for establishing shots and such. I had to comb through a bunch of footage of Mullholand Drive for a network show I worked on a couple years ago.

    Likewise, I had some of my work used in a Mark Wahlberg movie a few years back.  It was on an office wall and blurred so as to be unrecognizeable.  But, the movie still preferred to use a specifically licensed set of images, rather than risk using something that be questionable as to what extent the studio had the right to use it.  It wasn't specifically stock photos as in an online catalog of photos for sale.  But, it was the same idea.  I was asked if I had a typed of image, and they paid for the use in the film as a background prop. 

  • TSasha SmithTSasha Smith Posts: 27,432

    What is the coloring pages in adobe stock for?  Can I use them to make my own coloring book?

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 42,135
    edited May 2019
    SixDs said:

    I don't use them a lot, but occasionally I have used them for backgrounds, for pose references and just as inspiration and references for other 3D work. Other uses that I know of, in addition to those already mentioned, include the bases for digital painting, and photo-manipulation and compositing, both of which seem to be popular.

    ...same here.  For example, in my girls at the bus stop scene I did a while back, I used a royalty free panoramic shot of Zagreb from a hillside vantage which I then created a mask from so I could also use an HDR dome and sky to add more depth.  The one trick with using a stock photo and getting it to blend "seamlessly" with the rest of the elements in the scene is to make sure the lighting intensity and shadow angles match.

    Everything else in the scene, including the helicopter in the sky and trees reflected in the window of the shelter are 3D elements.

    -bus stop 1960s photo.jpg
    1500 x 1125 - 2M
    Post edited by kyoto kid on
  • TSasha SmithTSasha Smith Posts: 27,432

    I am trying out Adobe Stock and I find their file names confusing.   It is AdobeStock_#####.zip or something like that.  If a download fails then I am trying to figure out which one failed and download it again.

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