what is stock photography?
That’s a good question. People often ask me what I do for a living. I tell them I’m a stock photographer. And then that usually leads into a discussion prefaced by this question: what is stock photography?
Here’s the skinny, or at least this is how I understand it:
Stock photography consists of existing photographs that can be licensed for specific uses. Book publishers, specialty publishers, magazines, advertising agencies, filmmakers, web designers, graphic artists, interior decor firms, corporate creative groups, and others use stock photography to fulfill the needs of their creative assignments.
Ok, you got me, that’s not from me; that definition is from answers.com
Here’s my definition: stock photography is the specific field of photography that produces photographs for creatives to use in the creative’s projects. That’s it in a nutshell.
Ok, so what does that mean?
Basically, there is a huge market of people that are trying to communicate something. They want to communicate an idea, a product, a message, a feeling, etc., and so to communicate, they create something that carries that message. We’ll call that something a project. The project is the medium of the message. The creative produces a project to communicate a message. Now there’s about a trillion ways to communicate something, and probably another trillion mediums to use to communicate a message, and one of those mediums is photography.
A photograph is really just a bunch of colors on a piece of paper. These colors get together and form symbols. We, as humans, then interpret those symbols and that creates meaning.
So these creatives want to communicate something, and they do so with photography, because the photo means something and they incorporate that meaning to use in their project. Photos are powerful tools of communication, and the creative uses the photo as a tool to get their message across.
Now there’s a couple ways a creative can use photography in their project: one, they can hire a photographer to create the photograph that they can use; or two, they can look for photographs that have already been created by other photographers and use those photos in their projects.
Stock photography is the market of photos that have already been created by photographers. Then, a stock agency comes along and scoops up all the photos and bunches them together. All those photos put together is a site like gettyimages.com. Getty then creates a store where creatives can come and purchase a photograph off the shelf (well that’s basically what’s happening). A photographer produces a product called a photograph, submits it to the stock agency, the stock agency stores the product on its shelf waiting for the creative to browse through the products to pick one.
Anyway, that’s the long and short of it. Belle Media produces a product, called a stock photograph, that goes onto other store shelves, called stock agencies, where creatives can peruse through the products to pick the photo that they need for their projects. They use the photo in their project, and behold, a message is delivered. It’s a beautiful thing.