Stock Photography: The alternatives
I received a press release for a new site selling stock photos of ancient sites. I’m not linking to it because the photos cost hundreds of dollars, and the price isn’t revealed until after you register. I appreciate that photographic work isn’t just a case of point ‘n’ click, but I struggle with the concept of buying the rights to one photo of a Sicilian temple when I can fly to Palermo, pay for the carbon offset, and get dozens of my own exclusive photographs more cheaply.
I try and use my own photos for a lot of what I do but when that fails there are a few alternatives. Flickr has a Creative Commons search which is useful. The Stock Exchange also has free royalty-free photos for use. If I need something weird and professional I tend to use iStockPhoto, which costs, but isn’t bank-breakingly expensive.
If you want a specialised image search there’s the Archaeology Image Bank set up by the Higher Education Academy, which I’ll have to remember to donate some more images to. Leicester’s School of Archaeology and Ancient History also has an image bank.
The site is hoping to sell academic subscriptions, but I can’t help the money would be better spent on books.* There are plenty of affordable alternatives if you’re struggling to find an image.
* Or sending me to exotic locations so I can take photos for public use – there’s a real dearth of archaeological photos of Bondi Beach.
I would also point to http://www.stoa.org/gallery that has quite a few photos of archaeological with a public license.
Including some of yours!
Yes the Stoa is very useful.
Alun – thanks for the pointers (and for referring my little note to Four Stone Heart XIII). Sad to say my morning blog post took an hour because of you and your damned photo ideas (and fiddling with things like paragraph breaks).
Alon Hi,
I’m the director of marketing for Sites & Photos and wanted to address a couple of points you made in your short review of our site.
I think we can both agree that there is no resource available like ours anywhere in the world. It just doesn’t exist. When Sites & Photos was created, it was done so in order to fill the void that there is in the world with regards to digital high resolution images of Mediterranean sites. We’ve done so and we continue to do so. We have in our archive images of sites and monuments that have never been photographed or have not been visited in decades.
I’m not going to deny that our images can cost hundreds of dollars, but to tell you the truth, any image licenced for Academic published use for the most part will not even make the hunded dollar mark. It’s also true that you can go to iStock and pay $1 to $20 for any of their images, but you are very limited in Archaeology with any of the stock photo companies.
Our Academic Subscriptions pricing is based on the size of the Institution and when it comes to higher education, prices start at $750. I don’t think you can buy books that cover even one tenth of our content for that price. Let alone content that is updated every couple of month. We’ve got 84,000 images online right now, and are in the process of making available another 30,000 in the next couple of months from trips to Turkey, Italy and Israel. We don’t charge for the updates. They’re included in the yearly rate. We also don’t limit the amount of students that can enter from the institution or the amount of pictures they can download and use.
We also allow blogs to use our images, free. As long as we’re let known in advance and are properly credited with a link to the original image or homepage. I don’t know many exclusive stock agencies that do the same with such a free hand.
If you want to take a test drive of our Academic Subscription I’d be more than happy to provide you with one. Just email me, or use the contact form on our site. If you have any questions, also feel free to contact me.
Sincerest regards,
Olivier Amar
Director of Marketing
Sites & Photos