What’s a great way to make some good money? Where can you find sweet pictures for your new blog? How can you find an image that you can put in your next project? Can you just Google Images your way to success? In occasional cases you can, but a lot of those images are someone else’s property — so, where can you find images that are free to use for anything?

The answer to these questions all lie with stock images (also known as microstock).

Stock images, or royalty-free images, are in huge demand. Since blogs and other methods of sharing online have become more widespread, so has the demand for images that aren’t copyright-protected. There are some great free ways to find stock images (Photo Dropper and SXC.hu are two of my favorites), but if you want the high-quality stuff you’re going to have to pay some good dollar for it.

What is Fotolia?

Let me illustrate Fotolia’s service with an example: You just started making some chump change mowing people’s lawns. You want to post fliers up around the neighbourhood. You don’t have the resources to hire a graphic designer yet though, so all you’re left with is a trial version of Photoshop and that 2.0 megapixel camera on your BlackBerry.

But whose lawn are you going to take a picture of? Does that image quality represent your business well?

Instead of doing that, you can download a high-quality, high-resolution image from Fotolia, and use it in your poster/business card. Best of all, it’s affordable and totally legitimate to use.

All these beautiful lawns!

Fotolia is a microstock service that provides stock-free images, video clips, illustrations, and vectors. Basically, members pay for one of these types of files to use in their own creations. For example, directors might use a transition video clip that they purchased from Fotolia in their documentary.

Members can also choose to upload their own image files and clips and sell them through Fotolia. This provides amateur photographers and hobbyists a great opportunity to do what they love, and helps support them. Sounds good so far.

Downloading Images with Fotolia

Fotolia’s image quality is certainly up to par with standard stock image sites. From the images I’ve downloaded, I can definitely say that I love the uniqueness and the wide scope that Fotolia has to offer. That said, you’re going to have to cough up a good amount of money for higher-resolutions. If you just want a smaller-sized image for your business card that’s not a big deal (I’d still recommend an M size) – if you want an image for a poster though, it might be.

Fotolia allows you to pay for images either using a subscription system, where you buy a plan and are allowed to download a certain number of images a day, or through a system where you buy their own currency – called credits. The more credits you buy in one sitting, the cheaper each credit will cost. If you plan to buy credits, you might also want to have a look at Fotolia Promo Codes.

Here are the standard rates of Fotolia:

Comparatively, I looked at iStockphoto, a competing stock photography service. Their credits are noticeably more expensive than Fotolia.

This comes as a surprise to me, because their standard rates are pretty similar:

There are a great amount of pictures available on Fotolia, which means that your money won’t be put to poor use. Of course, if you want to try it out initially, I’d definitely recommend starting off with a small amount of credits, especially if you’re running on a tight budget. Also, you can use the search function without having to purchase credits, so give that a look and see

Download speeds will depend on your own Internet Service Provider (ISP)’s speed; I’ve found mine to be excellent, which means Fotolias upload speed isn’t shabby.

What if you want to go wild while you download images? What if you download five at once? There’s this great feature in the Cart, which if you request, sends you an e-mail of a .zip file if you buy more than one image at once – that means all five will be sent in a compressed file, and can be downloaded within 48 hours. Don’t forget to download it! (I learned the hard way.)

Fotolia’s User Interface

Although not as modern or streamlined as iStockphoto, I think that Fotolias interface serves its purpose very well. It highlights and draws your attention appropriately — for example, if you haven’t selected a license in a cart, it will highlight the text in red. My eyes dart right to it every time.

I like the green and grey color scheme, but I think that there’s a bit too much white space. All the white space makes me kind of bored — but that’s a subjective call.

One useful, although a bit creepy, feature enables you to find photos of the same model. It’s pretty useful if you find that the model suits your aesthetic tastes but has a funny pose or is wearing something too informal. Conversely, if you find a model too serious in a photo, you’ll likely be able to find photos of him or her looking a lot more expressive.

Selling Photos on Fotolia

How about the flip side? Is it possible to make some good money by selling your photos on Fotolia?

You bet.

One of mine actually just got accepted a couple of days ago, and I’m excited to see how it’ll perform. Fotolia’s been pretty prompt with it. (Don’t mind the dates — they weren’t reviewing my submissions yet because I hadn’t finished filling out a form that I didn’t know existed.)

Ever wonder if you’re speaking to this lovely lady when you’re on the help line with your web hosting company?

It’s doubtful. Now you know where a lot of companies get their images from, and why they’re allowed to do it! Even better — you now know where to find useful resources to help represent your company in a more professional light.

Fotolia is a great service with a wide variety of high-quality images available. As you’ve seen in this review, doing even five minutes of due diligence will amount to you saving a lot of money — take advantage of Fotolia’s search function and know which images you’re going to buy before you spend money on those credits.

Photo Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/26728047@N05/5976786511/ (Ironically my Fotolia subscription ran out so I couldn’t grab an image that I would haeveliked to feature.)

Today, I was invited to a family dinner that was slightly to slow-paced for my taste. The food ended up taking an hour to come, and the conversation dragged on from purchasing glasses to Chinese names. I have hardly any experience in the latter category, so you might imagine I grew quite bored. I drew out my Sony Ericsson w600i, which does happen to be a camera phone like all phones made in the last two years, and began fooling around with the camera. Luckily, the restaurant was very well designed and decorated, so I had many items to try it out on.

Before continuing, I’d like to disclose some information:

• My own Sony Ericsson w600i is almost two years old – it has been released for nearly the same amount of time, so as you can imagine, the camera quality will not be as great as one of a w810i or the world-class camera phone complete with Xenon flash, k790i.
• I am not a professional photographer – quite the contrary; I’ve got the interest in photography but definitely lack the skill and experience.
• I am aware I probably looked like a doofus, especially to people who walked through when I was taking a picture. However, my sense of boredom overcame my sense of shame and I decided to go along with such a scheme anyway.
• If you’re looking to put stuff in your portfolio or your school project or even something just as simple as remembering precious family moments, don’t use a camera phone.

We’ll start with my main point: every camera and phone is different, so you’re going to want to experiment. It takes time to find out the optimum settings to take pictures. I realized soon that the maximum resolution was sacrificing response time, so I decided on lowering it to a moderate 640×480 (the w600i has a 1.3mp camera, meaning it has a maximum resolution of 1280×1024). I switched the quality to Fine and mainly tampered with the White Balance, shifting from Incandescent to Fluorescent and then Cloudy. Here were the results; you tell me which one you thought was best.

The next step: how you hold the camera phone will affect the result. If you’re going for the “fly” look and hold it with one hand, it’ll show. If you’re holding it like a normal person with two hands, it’ll show. Some will look much less blurred, some will look like they were taken with a real camera! Because the average human’s got pretty jittery hands, you’re going to want to hold it with both hands, even if it makes you look like a nimrod (unless you’ve got really steady hands). Also, pull the sniper-trick – I read about this in Wired once, if I’m not mistaken: breathe in for five seconds, hold your breath for five seconds, and breathe out for five seconds. Repeat. This is supposed to slow your heart rate (assuming I remember correctly) and calm you down a bit, meaning you’ll have steadier hands.

If you’re going to turn a deaf ear to my advice, and want to replace your camera with a camera phone, common sense will tell you to invest your money in a powerful camera phone. Something like a Sony Ericsson k790i, k850i, or a Nokia N95 costs a sure heck lot more than a normal camera, but if you really want results from a camera phone, then this is what you’re going to want. Higher resolutions, Carl Zeiss lens, Xenon flash, and all the trimmings. Not to mention they’re pretty powerful devices that can do pretty much anything you want them to do.

There really aren’t any universal tricks to taking better pictures, as it’s already pretty subjective to compare which photo looks better from a camera phone: you have to take into consideration the focus (or lack thereof) and the colour capture, not to mention a whole mountain-sized pile of other things. To recap, if you’re resolving to take better pictures:

1. Experiment with your camera phone. Perhaps practise, even.
2. Throw away your dignity and hold the camera phone like a normal person.
3. Invest your money in a stronger camera phone.
4. Thank Herbert Lui for such a wonderful and common-sense filled tutorial.

Have fun snapping those shots away.