It is routinely used in advertising, editorial, brochures, multimedia, catalogs, annual reports, record albums, television commercials, posters, calendars, greeting cards, credit cards, AV shows, and most recently it is widely used on the World Wide Web. The market for stock photography is expanding at a rapid pace with new uses every day. Stock photographs are produced in two basic ways. Photographers retain rights to the images they produce on assignment for clients and turn those images into stock photography or they actually fund elaborate productions to generate images specifically for stock. In traditional assignment photography a photographer is hired to illustrate an idea or capture some event.
Stock photography offers the guarantee.
The user can see the an image without paying for the cost of the whole shoot. The other big benefit of stock photography is the ability to for an end user to see images fast and in some cases immediately. For today's fast paced society many times there is simply no time to wait for a particular image to be photographed and stock offers that solution. For the photographer the benefits of stock photography are enormous. Over time many images will generate far more income than did the actual assignment.