Stock Photo Ideas

Being a web developer takes you to a point where you have to get some images for the website you are creating. When I was just starting to create web pages for some clients, I was just taking images from Google image search and putting them in my designs.

Nobody ever told me that the images are stolen and nobody actually cared. Since I’m doing micro-stock photography, I’ve also changed my attitude to images. If I want somebody to buy my images for let’s say a travel agency website, then I should buy images in micro-stock when I design a site for my client.

Despite the fact that designing sites for individual clients is not my daily work, I would like you to show the images that I’ve bought for these purposes from Dreamstime. Why Dreamstime? Because they have an excellent option to buy as much credits as I need without spending over $100 for a subscription that lasts for whole month. You can buy let’s say 20 credits for $20 (I don’t remember the exact prices and thus might be wrong) and spend the credits whenever you want. At the moment I’ve downloaded a total of 18 images for 2 designed websites. In this post I will show you the first 10 images I used for a forestry website.

The website is for a company specializing in forestry, planting forests, lumbering, buying and selling forests. One of their main ideas was to have nice looking wildlife and forest pictures on their website to show that they care about nature. The interesting thing was that I was too lazy and busy to do the searching for them and I have bad experience with customers who think that the pictures I have chosen are not as good as they should be. I just gave the Dreamstime link to my client and let them search the images. At the evening of the same day they sent me back a list of links to images they would like to see on the web page. Excellent! After paying for the credits via PayPal I immediately downloaded the images and put them in page design. The best part was that while talking with client about the page design, there was no discussion about images at all and the client quite soon accepted the final version of the page design. Maybe that’s some kind of psychology - the client felt like he has participated in the design process.

After this great experience I’ve decided to continue this way of working whenever I will need some images for some design jobs. Besides that - client also sees that the images are bought and there can be no copyright problems.

Ok, enough talking, here are the 10 images used for this website:

And finally here’s the screen shot of the website.:

Probably some of you might think - hey, but you are a hobbyist photographer! Why didn’t you go outside and shoot some great landscape pictures yourself? You would have saved a couple of bucks! The answer is simple - it’s easier to work with clients this way - they can choose the pictures they like from a huge database. The odds that you will shoot the images the way they like are quite minimal. Besides that - they see your expenses and you can easily include the price of images in the final bill.

The rest 8 used images are still to come in one of the next posts, otherwise including around 20 images in a single post would be too much.