Art
Siegel

Enhance Your Web Site With Stock Photography

Many Web sites, brochures and PowerPoint presentations now uses clip art. Clip art was OK in its day, but most people are tired of the cartoon-like quality it imparts. To make your materials stand out from the crowd, it's time for you to move to the next level, particularly on the Web.  Enhance Your Web Site With Stock Photography. 

Look through nearly any magazine or professionally prepared brochure, and you’ll see it is loaded with photography. Some of the photos are highly specific -- a person in the news, a product in use -- but most of it is merely suggestive, used to enhance the text and add color, a mood and a style to the page.

You’ve certainly seen all this photography, but you may not have known how much of it is "stock" photography.

What Is Stock Photography?

Most professional photographers make their living by shooting custom photographs for their clients: the company needs photos of their new building for their annual report, and they hire a pro to take these shots. While on this assignment, the professional photographer will take many photos, only a few of which are needed by the client. The rest end up in the photographer’s portfolio.

Through these professional engagements and other opportunities, professional photographers can end up with a huge portfolio, consisting of many thousands of images. They may sell some of these to other clients. (Someone needs a photo of a truck being unloaded, and the photographer just happens to have the right shot.) Photographs which are made available for general use are called stock photos.

In addition to selling stock photos directly to end users, most photographers also contract with stock photo companies, which are basically photo brokers. Acting as agents for many photographers, they sell the rights to use photos to companies like yours.

Why use stock photography?
If you need a photo of your company president or your latest product, you hire a photographer to take them; there is no other choice. But if you need a photo of the Mojave Desert to make a point about how dry a home can feel before installing your humidifier, it would be silly to send a crew to the desert. You can purchase the use of this shot for a whole lot less.

When designing a new brochure, direct mail piece, print ad or Web site, most designers will look first to determine if the images they need are available as stock photography. And only if they are not available, will they hire someone to take the shot.

Photography vs. clip art
In some ways, stock photography can be used interchangeably with clip art -- either can be used to add color and images that reinforce text. Until very recently, the abundance of cheap or free clip art made it the primary choice for small businesses looking to add images to their work.

But stock photography is rapidly replacing clip art. Photography simply looks more professional. (Artwork can look great, but very little of it does.) In the past, the big barriers to using stock photography were high cost and the difficulty of dealing with it. A single photo often cost $150 or more per use. And it was usually shipped out as a large-format transparency which required a pre-press photo lab to convert into a format suitable for reproduction. Thus, stock photos were seldom used outside professional advertising agencies or photo shops.

Now, all that has changed. Stock photos have entered the mainstream and can be used by anyone having a little creative energy. Most stock photos are now distributed via CD-ROM or are downloaded via the Internet. You can buy just the right image from a catalog containing tens of thousands of images, or purchase an entire library of images for what a single image used to cost.

What are you getting when you buy stock photography?
You’re not getting exclusive ownership of the photo. That same image may be sold to others, even your competitors. What you’re getting is the non-exclusive right to use the image in your materials, subject to limitations specified by the owner. The major limitation is usually that you cannot resell the image. And if you post it on a Web site, the owner usually wants some form of copyright protection.

How Is Stock Photography Used?

Whether in a printed sales tools, such as a brochure, or on a Web site, stock photography is used in three primary ways:

• As is
• With text
• Artfully transformed

Using photography as-is
This is the simplest approach. Let’s say you’re running a travel agency specializing in exotic locations. On your Web site, you want to give your customers a sense of what it would be like to stand in a Moroccan street market. You browse through the many available photos for this subject, pick one that fits your layout, perhaps crop it a bit and drop it in place on your site.

A surprising number of stock photos exist for even highly specialized marketing materials. If you’re a gardener, you can find existing stock photos of virtually every type of flower, tree and bush. If you sell computers, no problem finding photos of every make and model, from most any angle.

At all the major stock photo houses, you just browse their catalog to find what you want. Or you contact them via phone or e-mail and describe what you're looking for; they'll search their catalog for you. Stock photo companies have many more photos in their libraries that don't appear in their catalogs, or new ones they've acquired since the last catalog was developed.

While stock photo companies are your best source for most stock photos, they are not the only source. Want a photo of a 747 landing? Just call the public relations office of any major airline and take your pick, all for free. Need a Caterpillar tractor grading a road? Just ask the manufacturer. How about a delicious Idaho potato? Or a Florida orange tree? There are agricultural agencies in every state that will gladly send you what you need.

Using photos with text
For the Web, an ideal application of photography is as a button, linking to another area of your site. Rather than using a solid color or texture, you can make a much more attractive button, and one that is suggestive of the area being linked to, by cropping a stock photo to a rectangular shape and then adding text over the photo to describe the link.

For example, use a photo of a sales representative on the phone, with the text "Call us for a custom quote," or a picture of that Moroccan market peddler with "Book today, meet me in person next week."

Artfully transforming photos
Earlier I mentioned that the same stock photo you use is also available to others, perhaps even your competitors. But you can make your image feel unique, while tailoring it to your specific purpose, by modifying it. Here are some examples:

• If the photo shows a person facing to the left, flip the image so the person faces right. This can create a better visual balance for your page, while making the photo look different from the version someone else is using.
  
  
• Crop the photo in a unique way. If you’re that travel agent using the Moroccan street market, you might start with a photo showing a large market, and then crop it to emphasize two people negotiating the price of a rug. This makes the photo tell a different story, while creating an image that is different from the version anyone else is using.
  
  
• Combine two or more images. One easy example of this is to start with a photo of a computer having a blank screen. Then paste onto the screen an image that relates to your topic. Or use one of the many "transparent" object images (objects having no background) and paste it over another stock photo.
  
  
• Enhance the photo with special effects. Many paint or photo retouching programs offer effects tools that let you easily modify stock photos: create a watercolor effect, wrap the image around a cylindrical shape, add softness around the edges so the eye is drawn to the center, add perspective, alter the colors and much more. Each of these can be used to give images on your site a special look.

Use Stock Photo Images As Graphical Icons

In a simple Web site, it’s usually not too difficult for browsers to know where they are in the site. But as the site grows in complexity, navigation becomes more difficult. As users click from one page in the site to the next, they can easily lose track of where they are.

One way to assist them is to give different areas of your site a distinct look that helps users know where they are. For each department in your site, you might use a unique treatment for background wallpaper images, table borders or font colors for the major title on each page.

And most helpful is a photo -- alone or with text -- that is consistently used in the same location on all pages relating to the same topic.

For example, a manufacturer of computer hardware, software and services uses a close-up photo of a circuit board for the hardware department, a hand holding a CD-ROM for software and a technician helping a customer for the service department.

These same photos are used on the site’s home page along with links to the various departments. So someone who is interested in the company’s software products clicks on the software icon and then sees that icon repeated on every page in the software department.

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Of the many possible ways to enhance both the visual quality and clarity of your Web site, it's tough to beat photography. And the availability of inexpensive stock photography on most any subject makes it simple for both experienced designers and novices to easily add first-rate professional photographs to their sites.

SeaBird Associates Inc
3011 NE 7th Drive
Boca Raton, FL 33431
Phone: 561-750-9233
E-mail: Art Siegel

About Art Siegel