To put it simply, the stock photography offered on this site blows hardcore. This shit sucks. It is absolutely impossible to find anything of worth in the stock section of this website. Let me elaborate and give examples to back up my claim.


Stock photography, by its nature, is meant to be used by others. It is not a medium where one is supposed to take low-resolution pictures of themselves in a mirror using terrible lighting and some bullshit props or a use a bedsheet as a toga. It is not a medium where the goal is to be as creative as possible. The goal is to take photos that have the greatest range of usability. Here are a few things to keep in mind.

1. Low resolution (and I mean anything below 2048x1536) is pointless, unless you want to specifically limit your photos to be used on the internet. That's all well and good if you do, but bigger is always better. You can resize down easily, morons, you can't just resize up the same way. This is shit you should know already, but for some reason I still find 800x600 and 1024x768 images littering the stock galleries.

2. If you are ugly, then take pictures of someone else. Nobody wants to use a wildebeast in an advertisement or a god damn Bigfoot-looking thing in a piece of art. And if you are either one of those two, you are surely well aware of it, and if you still feel the need to take nude shots, then I may feel the need to projectile-vomit on my keyboard and then beat you to death with a rolled-up paper bag. There is a reason your photos only get 12 views. Its because no one wants to look at you. Take a hint. So please save me some money and what little innocence I may have left.

3. Do not take a picture of yourself. Especially using a mirror or reflective object of any kind whatsoever. This includes holding a camera at arms length and blindly hitting a button. If you are so conceited that you can't find anyone else worth photographing, or you have to see yourself immortalized in pixels to have any self worth, then stop taking photographs altogether. You are doing more harm than good to the community and your bullshit photos will merely take up space on DA's servers that could best be used elsewhere.

4. Use a high-contrast background. When you are shooting a subject, whether it be a macro shot of an object or a portrait of someone, (remember, other than yourself) a high-contrast background is key. The only exception is for when the type of shot demands no background at all. (Landscape/scenery, underwater, animals, plants, etc.) This allows the artists who are going to use your work, like me, an easier time with it.

5. And take more than one shot. I don't mean photograph the same thing several times and upload them all together, with the only thing being different the timestamp from the camera in the bottom corner. Move around. Rotate. Take from all angles. And if you are someone described in #2, and have so far ignored #3, then one shot is fine, and I'd appreciate it if you kept that one to yourself too. I have seen pages upon pages upon mountains of pages with more than 10 shots of the same angle of the same subject with the same lighting, and the only thing different is.... well, there really isn't a difference. They just all look the same and the photographer didn't bother to cut out or edit any photos or spend any more effort than dumping a whole gigabyte memory card onto DA's server all at once.

6. Keep the subject of the photos in the middle, as in, not going off the borders. Any image editor anywhere in the world can use the crop feature. Hell, even MS Paint can do that. This also goes back to #1. Shoot as large as possible, and at as high quality as possible, and keep the subject in the middle. I am more than happy to crop images on my own, much more than I like scouring millions of photos on DA.

7. If I seem too critical, or if one of you wants to tell me that your stock photographs are your business, then I have this to say. Fuck off. Ninety percent of the stock on this site is crap. The good stock artists don't submit much, because they take the time necessary to produce really great work. Its the people with too much time, an itchy shutter-finger, and not enough taste that are the ones you see with stock galleries numbering in the hundreds (or thousands, in a few cases) They are the people who care so little about producing good work that they rape this site submitting everything that they can in the hopes that quantity will make up for a severe lack of quality.


And now, the part where people start to get mad. This is where I call out stock artists that suck, and give credit to the ones that are good.

=RLDStock She is just not that good. I browsed over 35 pages of this gallery and found one solitary photo that I thought might have some usefulness. Ironically, it was on the profile page as the featured deviation.

[link] This is not it. This is typical of what you find here.
[link] This is it. She rightfully got credit for this shot. Its excellent.

*mjranum-stock This guy is excellent. He's got the formula down wonderfully. No wonder he's got 750k page views.

*FaeDuSoliel
[link] This is stock!?!? WTF?


That's it. I'm sick. It'll take me less time to work enough and by my own camera, hire a model, and take the shots I need myself, than it will to find something even half decent on here.