Stock Photography

In this high-tech, fast-paced world, we all "snap pics." I'm going to go ahead and venture a guess that the majority of us tend to do so from our phones, since we now have these amazing portable devices that can provide a decent exposure for us. What has come out of these great technological advances is a larger-than-ever movement of aspiring photographers... which is great! The internet is now more saturated than ever with some pretty decent amateur work. So my big question for you today is, does this in-fact hurt the Professional Photographer?

Motion Array has been hard at work adding new features recently. For example, they recently came out with a video portfolio site builder. With this feature, any paid subscriber can create a custom site to show their video work, complete with text, images, and contact information (all editable). Users can even use their own custom domain or have one supplied by Motion Array. But now, Motion Array is at it again with Requests. Essentially, any paid member of the Motion Array community can put in a request for any type of creative asset that Motion Array offers.

Today, Adobe has announced the public beta of the Adobe Stock Contributor Site. Meant to integrate deeply with its Creative Cloud platform, the new service allows photographers, videographers, and illustrators to directly upload and sell their work with a high degree of efficiency and automation.

It's about time for a new approach. There are a few online stores and stock libraries where you can get templates, videos, and music that help you save time when creating professional videos. Some of them can get really tricky when dealing with prices and licensing.

Up until now, most stock image sites let you search by keywords, categories, date range, location, or other similar refinements. For most image buyers this has ben sufficient, however 500px has a new way to search called "Splash."

A number of websites offer multimedia content to content creators for their projects through an easy-to-access online portal. But as well as those sites serve the many that use them, they all have one thing in common: they set the price for all content. Letting photographers, videographers, and musicians set the price for their own work, Pond5 is an exception in a set of businesses between which it is increasingly hard to differentiate.

Sam Zeller is giving it all away. It began with releasing 184 photos for creative commons use on stock photo site Unsplash. From there the Swiss photographer and FujiFilm ambassador has decided to unload an entire archive of his images taken across Europe for free use to anyone with the aptitude to find them.

Ankur Patar is a photographer and digital artist based in Brisbane with a very neat and unique talent. He's able to create remarkable replicas of famous works of art using nothing but stock photos and Photoshop. Check out this amazing video of him recreating a Rembrandt work.

Adobe updated its Creative Cloud Suite today with new features for many of its apps. In addition to a number of new and refined features across several applications (including some not mentioned in the title), this update focuses on improving performance in Photoshop, while it also offers a return to an old favorite.

Just the other day I was thinking about the great footage and images I have that might do well in a stock library. I just didn't know where to go and which site was best. so I closed the folder and let it go. But, here at Fstoppers we get the best news first. Perfect timing for sure. We got a heads-up from Dissolve that they are launching a rights-managed stock library with 50,000 images on June 1st. They also want to open it up to individual photographers to contribute and form part of their premium stock offering.

Directors each have their signature shots, or do they? Creative trademarks like Wes Anderson’s symmetry, Alfred Hitchcock’s zoom-but-not-zoom, and Quentin Tarantino’s trunk shots might be central to their success — but so are the thousands of “normal” frames surrounding these shots: connective tissue often obtained from second units, stock archives, and even other films.

Adobe Stock has been around for a short while now, featuring useful, deep integration into Creative Cloud products, as well as a more traditional online portal through which to purchase content. Through a blog post on its website, Adobe recently announced these platforms will now benefit from native 4K video content in addition to the photos and standard high-definition videos previously offered.

If you're like me, you have way too many apps on your smartphone. I know this might sound crazy coming from Fstoppers, but we really do rely too much on our phones. Yes, even the great iPhone 6s Plus. “Connectivity Lost,” by filmmaker Walter Stoehr, is a short showing what could go wrong if we depend on our phones too much.

Musicbed, the music licensing website in which many filmmakers rely on for quality pieces to accompany their videos, has launched a new site with big goals in the film licensing sector. Filmsupply is not content with the way stock footage tends to always stick out, and wants to change that with a highly curated library from hand-picked contributors.

Philadelphia based Director of Photography Mitch Martinez thought the world needed access to more 4K footage for free. So, he collected clips he shot from all over the United States and created a catalog with over 35 different categories of footage on his website just for that. An even cooler aspect of this collection: it's free for commercial use as well.

Monday, GoPro unveiled a new licensing service that allows professionals to license content to agencies and brands. GoPro calls the service "a premium content licensing portal for global advertising brands and agencies to license premiere video and images” that “offers high production value content.”

Yesterday, along with many other updates across its creative suite, Adobe announced new its stock image licensing program. The libraries are integrated directly into Adobe’s various creative software, making it incredibly easy for users to browse, test, and integrate stock images or graphics directly into their projects. Adobe acquired stock photo provider Fotolia earlier this year, and has used its image and graphic assets to launch this new service. According to Adobe, there are over 40 million different image and graphics available, with contributors adding new content daily....

Flickr's tumultuous history has been well documented over the years, but this photo sharing site has been fighting back with revamped designs, generous storage for users and new photographic services. Among these initiatives is a new Wall Art service, allowing users to make prints from a mind blowing 50 million freely-licensed Creative Commons images as well as Flickr hand-selected collections. While this service provides an opportunity for photographers to have greater exposure and to make money from their work, some are very upset with how their photographs are being treated.

Stock photo giant Getty Images has launched a new mobile application called Stream, free for iPhones and iPads updated to iOS 8. Getty Images Stream is introduced as their first consumer app in which allows users to access the company’s vast library of news, sport, and entertainment images. Users will be able to curate photos within the app, and share photos non-commercially on social media and blogs using Getty’s earlier implemented embed feature.

Figuring out a fair rate for providing photography or video services can be a slippery slope, filled with pitfalls if you happen to price yourself incorrectly. But what's more complicated than setting a rate for services is how to approach setting a rate for someone who wants to license a piece of work you've already created. In this post I'll share my insight on the factors I look at, and my rationale for determining a fair fee for video and photo licensing.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve got hard drives full of footage from personal or other non-commercial projects, that don’t serve much use once the project they were shot for is completed. I’ve considered trying to license it as stock footage, but never really taken the time to do it. After checking out the site Nimia and interviewing one of their staff however, I decided to give it a try.

Most of the readers of this site I’d wager fall into the category of content creators, not content consumers. That being the case, rants about not being properly compensated for the hard work put in to producing images comes up every so often. But have you ever been on the other side of that situation?

Creative writer Kendra Eash wrote a painfully accurate article for Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendencies that put into perspective what most brand and corporation videos look and sound like. Taking it to the next level, stock clip site Dissolve realized it was indeed generic, and pulled together their own stock clips cut to Kendra's writing, resulting in a hilarious edit.

Almost 6 years ago Getty Images and Flickr announced a partnership that allowed Flickr members to sell stock images through Getty. Over 400,000 images were picked by Getty editors since the partnership started and made them available for commercial use. Today Getty Images officially announced they won't renew their agreement with Flickr and will part ways.

'Awkward Stock Photos' is a great tumblr blog featuring some of the weirdest and the most unnecessary stock images in the world. From Santa without pants to a snake smoking pot all the way to a banana kicking a cow. You wont believe the amount of awkward stock photos companies like Shutterstock, iStockPhoto or Getty Images offer for sale. I wonder who are the people who shoot that stuff (and why?!), and more importantly - I wonder how many people buy these photos.

'From Love to Bingo in 873 images' is a short video and commercial which moves at 15 images a second. The video shows an entire lifetime depicted through stock images. Copywriter Sophie Schoenburg and art director Marcus Kotlhar spent 6 months making it happen and the end result is quite touching. I can only imagine how arduous going through all those images must have been!

His name is Jesper Bruun and they call him "the most downloaded man in the world." He is a male model that specializes in stock photography which gets published far more than standard photography simply because it is so cheap. I would agree that he is in more legitimate ads than anyone else but I may have to argue that his face is NOT the most used. Noam Galai, may still be winning that contest.