Istockphoto.com has a nice thing going on. You sign up, and the basic idea being you get access to a database of royalty free, high resolution images for use in, well, anything you wanna do, print, web, and whatnot. I've been a member for a couple of months. I paypal'ed them ten dollars and got 20 downloads. They've got some high quality images. I've even used one or two with projects at work.
The reason Istockphoto works, is that it totally feeds off the old-school barter idea. These aren't agency stock photographers. They are people like me who for one reason or another, upload images for other people to use. The neat part is that, if you submit something and it gets approved for inclusion into the collection, you in turn get a free download.
The same people have also started Istockpro.com, so I checked it out, browsed though the collection etc...
...and shockingly came upon this image:
I can't believe it. This is an image from Arkansas, from my part of the state, in fact from my hometown. What are the odds of someone like me, purely by accident running across an image from their hometown of less than ten thousand people? ...on a professional stock photography site?
Captain, the odds are spectacularly unfathomable.
The story behind the image is simple. Around 1990 the city of Malvern let somebody bull-doze the building in favor of a carwash, which is all too typical of my hometown.
The street the building faces is actually part of highway 67 that runs through the center of town. Before the interstate system, Highway 67 used to be the only road that ran from Texarkana to Little Rock, and a lot of traffic came through the area. This building was some kind of novelty gas station slash road-food-getting-place; novel in that it had a strange looking oriental styled roof, evidently built by stranded Chinese circus performers. That last part was a guess.
I can't believe I ran across this image so haphazardly.
Posted by drew at June 20, 2003 02:38 PM