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Not sure if this is mentioned before, but have you tried Flickr. I was in this situation a while back and was able to find a shot on Flickr by a decent photographer who had set the rights to protected. That is I was not able to simply use CC to grab and use. But I contacted the photographer directly and explained my situation and he was very open to licensing his work, for a much more reasonable fee than any of the big stock houses.
Adam Mercado Influxx Media Production Fullerton, CA
Moving Images. For Business 714°928°9896
On Apr 22, 2014, at 11:33 AM, Jim Curtis wrote: Warren,
No, I don't need exclusive rights to stock photos. I have looked at artbeats and footagefirm. They're both nice, but seem to concentrate on moving images.
To my utter shame and embarrassment, I'll disclose that every other year, I get work doing political ads, and the need for footage is usually issue related: immigration, healthcare, law & order, budget, seniors, soldiers, and a gamut of real life situations. This accounts for my frustration with ShutterStock, et al, who have these absurd "stylized" scenarios that outnumber realistic looking ones by 100:1.
Getty would be the go-to source for realistic "editorial" photos, but at $1000+ for even a local single-run TV ad. Most of my clients are running state races or for the US House, and are paying me about $2K/ad, and they're just not going to buy off on $6-10K for stock images. Getty also has a nice feature in their search engine which lets you choose between "creative" or stylized (usually hokey) setups, or "editorial" realistic/documentary style images. Alas.
I think there's bound to be a market for a stock company that deals in value priced, non-exclusive images, that has a customer oriented search engine that isn't an insult to our precious time.
Thanks for your reply, and also to George and Mike who offered excellent suggestions (both of which are out of my current client's price range, but with some extremely nice images). Brian's post came in as I was typing this. dollarphotoclub is priced well! And I see some of the same images that are on some other sites, and the site has that needle in a haystack search engine, but I can see some images there I'll end up getting.
I do use Creative Commons frequently for public domain shots of politicians, military ops, government buildings and monuments, etc. Also, all branches of the armed forces and NASA have images that are free. So, does the Library of Congress, but it's a beating navigating that site, too, and most of it is not very high resolution.
Thanks again, everybody!
Jim
Did these get mentioned yet? www.artbeats.com www.footagefirm.com
It might be worth doing a web image search with "Creative Commons-licensed content" in the text string.
Jim, do you know if you need exclusive use of the stock photos (typically a much higher price)? Just curious.
-Warren
Also, 500px.com now offers some stock images. $200 a pop is not cheap but, less than Getty.
-gl This is only tangentially related to Ae, as I'm doing some TV spots, and need stock photos to bring in and do some animations to - the pseudo 3D effect.
I have a beef with the low-budget stock houses like Pond5, Shutterstock, BigStock, iStockPhoto, etc.: Most of what they have is pure crap. Their search engines suck; returning hundreds of irrelevant results, and numerous duplicates, wasting my valuable time.
I know that you get what you pay for and if you want quality, you have to go to Getty, but my client doesn't have the budget to spend $1000 for each shot.
There may be some middle ground sources that I don't know about.
Can anybody recommend other sites, with useful photos that look like they came from real life or photojournalism, and not a bunch of hokey staged garbage with bad actors?
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