Digital Photography - What is Stock Photography?

There are many forms of photography and categories in which photos can be placed. Macro, portrait, landscape are a few types of photography that serve their own specific purpose and have their own differentiating quality's. Their is another type of photography that can take any form and is overlooked by many, the type I speak of is stock photography. Stock photos cater to the people using the digital photos for jobs, hobbies, and projects. These pictures can be purchased from what is known as a stock photo site, and the main buyers are graphic designers, advertisers, marketers, and anybody you can think that edit and use mass amounts of pictures. Now that you know the simple definition and who purchases these photos, you need to know what these photos consist of and how to take them.

Stock photos can be pictures of whatever you want, it could be any of the aforementioned categories like macro, or portraits. But usually the presentation will be a little different, and usually centralizes around what buyers of stock photography really need the pictures for. For example, if I am a photo buyer and I go over to a stock site looking for a particular image or type of image, a normal artistic photo of the subject matter might not warrant a purchase because of its presentation. The buyer might find your picture beautiful but it doesn't fit the purpose and the person cannot use it for his/her advertisement or magazine article (or whatever job it's used for). You could say that some of its aesthetic attributes may be stripped but that isn't to say that it is a easy type of photography.

To be more precise with the presentation of each use stock photos have I will go over a few jobs/occupations stock photos are used for. Graphic designers make logos, artistic pieces, magazine layouts amongst other projects. They prefer to have simpler pictures that are easy to edit or edit things out. Meaning that they are looking for matte backgrounds and no shadowing. Further more they might need several different iterations of a single picture presented at different angles. They will use these pictures to cut out images to properly fit the project or create extravagant designs.

Advertisers have similar expectations except they look for pictures with a little more content. Advertisers want to attract a crowd with their imagery, so compelling pictures are needed. They use everything from portraits to scenery. These pictures may still be thoroughly edited so a the degree of clarity and possibly a matte background remains the same from the graphic designer job.

The last type of job I'm going to touch upon quickly is magazines, articles, commercial and brochure. These jobs can all have graphic designers working on their pictures but a lot of time a single digital photo will say it all. These jobs often used unaltered pictures to express or clarify what is being said in the content. So if you see a article in a magazine that is titled "Overcoming Depression," there might be a stock photo to express such an event with a Women looking down exemplifying her feelings of depression.

Those are the types of stock photography, to find out more information or real life examples just check out a stock photo site. This line of freelance work can be very rewarding but also can be misleading if not fully understood.

Having read this article you should comprehend most aspects in the field and if you are looking to pursue a at home career than go to this site: Freelance Digital Photography Jobs

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