My Intro/Where to Find Free Stock Photos  

Image Courtesy of: ronymichaud (CC0 Public Domain)

By @zacherybinx 

This is going to double as my intro to the Steemit community as well as an article on something I feel I'm fairly knowledgeable about (stock photos) so figured I'd try and add some value to this post whilst introducing myself.  Feel free to jump down to the TL;DR image if you want to avoid my intro. 

Hello everybody! My name is Zack and I recently relocated to Mercer, Wisconsin from Milwaukee. I have my degree in Video & Motion Graphics but sadly have never really been able to use my degree for a permanent career rather only the scattered freelancing gig here and there.  I'm more of an amateur photographer/videographer on the side these days. I run a page on instagram dedicated to silhouettes so I tend to gravitate to silhouette shots.  Here's an example shot of mine:    

I grew up the majority of my life in the Madison, Wisconsin area, although from ages 3 to 8 I was lucky enough to live/grow up in the Caribbean on Grand Cayman Island.   

I know right? How did I ever go from the ocean to the crazy winters of Wisconsin and all the snow?   

Believe me, I dislike the snow and hope to get back to the ocean someday soon, but our summers up here are at least filled with many water sports on the multitude of lakes that exist in northern Wisconsin. So in my spare time in the summer I'm primarily trying to get outdoors to either swim or take pictures. 

Taking lots of pictures lead me to researching where to share my photography online and thus to stock photography, which is probably why you'll be reading this. I've only been on Steemit a few days upon writing this but in that time I've read quite a bit. I've been astonished with the content and how friendly and welcoming the community as a whole seems to be (most of the internet these days seems to be laden with troll comments). Steemit from what I gather seems to be based primarily around user generated content, more specifically articles.  It appears that a lot of people choose to regurgitate the memes/images they just google search for within their posts. By the end of this post, I hope to help many of you change that trend and be able to find fresh royalty free content for your articles. 

TL;DR -  Start here for Stock Photo Info 

Image Courtesy of: Monoar (CC0 Public Domain)

Without further ado I present you with a few of my favorite free stock photo/video resources: 

1. My favorite stock photo site is: pixabay.com, which has a ton of different images and is only growing. It touts itself as having "over 990,000 free stock photos, vectors and art illustrations" so chances are it has something you can use for an article at some point and will prove to be a useful resource to you. This site also has free stock video available, which is a great option for video editors as it gives you free material to edit. 

2. My second favorite and go to site for when I need high-resolution images (most articles probably won't need hi-res) is: unsplash.com. Unsplash doesn't have as much material as some other sites but the material they do have is very high end. You can always download a picture and crop part of it or size it down for your article to save on bandwidth. 

3. My third favorite is stocksnap.io which also has a tagalong program that is free for use on their sister site (snappa.com) that allows you to put graphics/titles (this makes it easy to create your own memes) with all of the images from stocksnap. They do also offer a pro membership that isn't free, but may be worthwhile for some of you to look into. I personally use Photoshop for all of my graphic/photo needs so I have yet to try this out, but it does look like a cool/easy to use UI for folk who aren't very tech savvy.  

Honorable mention: sellfy.com this site is great for a ton of different things not just photos. It has .psd (Photoshop file) premade layouts, fonts, designs, eBooks, templates for you name it, etc. and while there are some that are free they aren't all free. This is a great site for writers, content creators, graphic artists/designers and the like to sell their materials as well.  Another alternative for making your own memes is: memegenerator.net

If you want to sell physical products or just get ideas of what others out there are selling be sure to check: society6.com, cafepress.com, etsy.com and/or zazzle.com. It can be a very lucrative just browsing the aforementioned sites to figure out what's trending or hot among different sites and then from there using the trend(s) to pinpoint your creativity into one of those niches and do something no one else is doing or do it better than they already are. You have the luxury of the internet as your entire resource, so make use of it as much as possible by any means you can muster.   

I hope this little article has given everyone a good starting point to search for new images/stock photos to use in their articles. Please feel welcome to share with others what you all use and which of these methods or sites/other sites you prefer. 

Thanks to whoever takes the time to check out my first post.  I look forward to trying to do my part to help add worthwhile content to the Steemit community. 

Love, Peace & Chicken Grease, 

Zacherybinx  

Image source: Pixabay.com under CC0 Public domain license.