Finding (and Buying) stock photos for your online business...?

Hi there, it's been a while!

I am looking for information on how/where to buy stock photos for your business. Mine would need to be of people specifically.

I have done a GREAT deal of looking online, and found some awesome photos. The problem is, they are usually around 300 to 500 dollars a piece.

I cannot seem to find ones - and rarely ever ones of my type - for any rational price. There must be a market for these I am missing out on.

I am specifically looking for photos of "happy smiling people" such as couples or a single person (male or female).

I wanted to find out from everyone if they had experience with this, and how they did their research because I haven't found anything of substance to me.

(sorry if this is in the wrong area, seems the best)

Thanks!

That's what I found from corbis too.

I'm in the unfortunate situation of both wanting to sponsor and host a free community yet wanting to spice it up with photos of sports figures. And it's about $400 for six months to do this. However, my profit is: $0.00 and my expenses are about $-75.00/mo. So, obviously, with no income and endless foreseeable expense my budget is: nothing. But I'd do the right thing if I could afford it. My other options appear to be to try to obtain my own material or do without. Mind you I'm not looking for Tiger Woods, more like Bobby Crosby. So ...

For the cost of one photo license I can get a really good camera with a zoom lens.

I also have the added advantage of going to nearly every oakland a's home game, so getting photos of A's players in action, with a zoom, is definitely possible.

I cannot get a release from the players. That's the problem. If I do the other things, though, I can be assured that the Associated Press conglomerate won't sue me and as for the ballclub and players I'm only providing nonobtrusive promotion they probably welcome. I think that covers me until I get a cease and desist. You wanna pay attention to those

I think you really want to call the photographer and work it out, if you can. That's another thing I plan to do. I'll let you know how it works

That is one thing I may end up doing. I know a quite great female model who could do some high quality stuff for me. As for couples etc.. who knows.

But like you said, for that cost I could get a digital camera - or just pay people here and there. This seems to be something only high-end businesses can do, and I bet even then they surely make their own pics.

I guess stock photos is a NON-existant business, which is why I could barely find any!

But you should get a Model Release Form. It's a standard thing. I dated a photographer for years and she did fashion shoots, among other things and she always had a blank release form handy

You can probably also buy a DVD stock library somewhere that will undoubtedly have "happy, smiling people" ... that's really what stock libraries are all about. I never bought any. I'm looking for something a lot more specific: photos of the players of the oakland athletics american league mlb team. Which, by default, means miles of red tape. Then there are things you do to go under the red tape, and knowing there is no demonstrable negative financial impact and possible positive financial impact in regard to potential plaintiffs that it would be a rather silly thing to litigate.

But it sounds like you're in a different situation.

I know this may be 2 months late, but you could check out http://www.istockphoto.com/. They sell royalty-free photos for a small price. The way they work (AFAIK) is people send in photos, and any photo that someone wants is recorded and the person who sent that photo gets a small amount of money. Obviously, the internet site would charge more than what they'd pay the person in order to remain profitable, but in the end both parties get paid.

Hope this helps.

I like www.gettyimages.com for photos personally.

I found a web site the other week that offers free stock photography contributed by its users: stock.xchng at http://www.sxc.hu. They have a pretty big database of images and you can get print-quality files for most images there.