Stock Photography

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

So, I am making a game I hope to sell that has a bunch of animals in it. I'd like to have photographs of each animal. Thanks to the Denver Zoo, I should be able to get most of them on film, but that leaves a wide variety of animals to go.

I must be missing something when it comes to stock photography, though. Here's how I would like it to work in an ideal world:

- I go to a stock photography site. I enter a keyword search for something like gorilla. Images come up.

- I buy one for some amount of money that is less than a dollar. I neither have nor want any sort of exclusivity.

- I can now use this in my commercial work. I don't ever need to renegotiate anything. It is absolutely not the cornerstone of anything. The graphic will appear on the screen for a minute at most, in the game's run-time.


Here's how it SEEMS to work:

- People want something like $49.99 for a hi-res JPG.
- If you want to use it in any sort of commercial venture, the price goes up. Way up.
- The list of licensing terms is about four pages in length.

I am a humble man, but Jesus Christ - the most I would consider selling the indie game I am working on for is $30, and that's for a hard copy with printed-everything and a box. Two years and counting of development is going on. Meanwhile, photographers are looking for fifty bucks for a photo?

I am not disrespecting the field at all. But Jesus. If there is a mechanism in place for something like, "I need a pic, but only for a few seconds!" I'm sure not seeing it.

Anyway, I am really curious if some website along the lines of how I think it should work exists.

[AArdvark]

Not a chance. You see how it is on the internet. You would be better off going to the zoo with a big-ass telephoto lens. Or change the game around to reflect things you can easily get a photo of at home.

] There is a housefly here. It seems to be on a window screen.

Get housefly

] As you reach out to capture the fly an old gas receipt falls out of your pocket.

read receipt

] The gas receipt is dated last year, that means you still had money left for beer last year.

[Guest]

http://flickr.com/search/?q=denver+zoo

[edit] Licensing
Flickr offers users the ability to release their images under certain common usage licenses. The licensing options primarily include the Creative Commons 2.0 attribution-based and minor content-control licenses - although jurisdiction and version-specific licenses cannot be selected. As with "tags", the site allows easy searching of only those images that fall under a specific license.

[Worm]

Just steal them off wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Bokito1_gorilla.jpg

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

There are a number of images on Wikipedia that have a license that says, "public domain, do whatever the fuck you want to do with it." That is perfect. Thank you, Worm.

By the way, for people who hate copyright, the entire bevy of kibology-reading shitters that came up with stuff like "copyleft" and the "GNU 2.1 Documentation" that is in the terms of a text file, being applied to a graphics file, are all MISERABLE FUCKING BASEMENT-DWELLING LOSERS. You all deserve to have your stuff ripped off, and I wish I had the lack of integrity to do it.