Today we discuss stock photos and how and why to use (or avoid) them in your web designs. Drew plays the part of the knowledgeable designer, and Micah plays the part of the frustrated and impatient developer. You want to enhance your designs (or big walls of text) with some imagery, and we try to brainstorm some ways to get those images without heading down the stock photography road.

Discussion Points

When should I use (or avoid) stock photography?
Can I take my own photos?
If I want to find a photo on Flickr instead of a stock site, how can I search for it?
How do I go from an article or text idea to finding the perfect image to complement it?
How can I avoid being overwhelmed by image libraries that have thousands (or millions) of images in them?
How I do use sites that post new images every day?

Custom Photo Shoot Examples
Here are a few of the examples that Drew mentions for the custom photo shoot:

Obsidian Portal Portfolio Item

3rdHome Portfolio Item

Danger Ahead! Challenge
Micah challenged Drew to find a better "Danger Ahead" road sign without using a paid stock photo site. For example, if you're writing a blog post about "Dangers with AJAX", you might use an image like this:

iStockPhoto Results

Flickr Creative Commons Results

And the winner is...
There are a lot of very nice images on Flickr, but they don't fit nearly as close to the original goal as the iStockphoto results. You'll have to be much more flexible in your interpretation. If you want exactly a "Danger Ahead" road sign, you'll need to use stock photos. If you're willing to expand your definition of what it means to express "danger" then perhaps Flickr is acceptable. For example, with a little searching and tweaking I found the following Creative Commons licensed image taken by Elliot Brown:

References
Large Image Repositories

Library of Congress
Digital Comics Museum

Swipe File Resources (check them periodically)

New Old Stock
Death to the Stock Photo
Gratisography
BibliOdyssey

Next Time
Stay tuned for our next podcast on Flexbox! It will be hitting the airwaves on October 13.