Waitsfield, VT
![It’s hard to believe that over a decade after it hit the mainstream, this is the first All Your Base I’ve been involved with.
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Are You Seriously Using Stock Photos?
It’s a mind-boggling notion: paying a third party for pictures of actors and models simulating what your company does. What part of that isn’t obviously idiotic? I’ve been over this before—in a world where cell phones outnumber citizens, and include cameras at a rate of 90%, there’s no excuse for not being able to take your own photos.
What’s your argument—that cell phone photos “look bad”? Maybe back in ‘06, but it’s a very different story today. In all but the most extreme conditions, blame for bad camera phone photos should be laid solely at the feet of the operator.
If you’re seriously concerned with your site’s aesthetic—and nothing says you aren’t like three Martians and a pie chart—hire a real photographer to take real pictures of yourself or your staff at work. Not only will you stand out from the other twenty firms who chose “Business Meeting with Laptop”, but you’ll make a contact in the local community who’ll do more for your reputation than the burnt offering you make at the foot of the Getty monolith.
I’ll concede there are situations where non-original photography is order—say you need famous locations or or exotic locales far from your place of work. That said, you’re almost certainly better off going the Creative Commons route with images you can see at full quality, and resize to fit your prototypes. Or you could drop fifty bucks guessing off a blurry, undersized, watermarked sample and hope for the best—it’s your call.
But I’ll return to what I began with: if you do something and you want pictures of it, there’s no better way to get them than to photograph yourself. As a potential employee, nothing says “you don’t want to work here” like a website full of people who don’t work here.
