Stock photography is often used in web design to fullfil the needs of a creative assignment instead of hiring a photographer. The number of sites offering stock photography is growing year on year, and whilst the recognisable stock image galleries are still some of the best, Getty Images, Dreamstime, Corbis etc there are also some completely free stock image galleries popping up that can provide designers with quality professional imagary, without adding to the cost of the project.

Here we take a look at the top 5 stock image sites that provide their images for free.

Stock.Xchng

Stock Xchng features over 400,000 high quality images. They are one of the leading free stock image sites on the web and also offer paid images as well as free stock images.

Morgue File

The Morgue file offers free high resolution digital stock images, it is a classic resource that has been the standard for free stock imagary over the last few years.

Free Stock Photography

Over 100 categories on this site. A little less choice than some of the others but you can still find high quality photographs completely free.

Free Pixels

This site has an easy to use search function along with a really useful tag cloud. Search over 3,000 images however some are paid images.

Stock Vault

Over 13,000 from over 3,600 photographers! They also have really helpful tutorials, videos and articles making this site a must for every designers bookmark bar.

Having been around since the early 1980s it has proven it self to capture and engage peoples attention and be an inventive way to promote your brand. Guerrilla marketing can be used by large organisations or small start up companies.

One of the earliest campaigns was from Adidas having struggled with promoting the brand after changes in management they needed to pull something big out of the bag and their answer was to give pairs of Adidas trainers away to rappers in New York and if you are a child of the 80s you will remember Run DMC bringing out a single called “My Adidas”.  If you don’t remember the song then see the bottom of the post.

Todays guerrilla marketing has changed from the early days and is now more inventive and sometimes challenging.

Here are some of my favorites:-

The important thing to remember about guerrilla marketing as a technique is it becomes ineffective once it has been used, marketers need to keep ahead and find new ways to grab the attention  otherwise what was a surprise marketing campaign that everyone was talking once will soon something that people have forgotten and are bored with.

Whether you like this marketing technique or not you have to agree that it does make you stop and stair – it works!

Just in case you don’t remember – you’ve got to love the 80s.

I’m sure everyone has seen examples of HDR images around the web or used in adverts and movie posters. Why is HDR so desirable? A composite image can retain the interesting details from all exposure settings within one image.

Since it’s first commercial use in the mid 1940′s, to illustrate nuclear explosions on the cover of life magazine, the desirability of HDR has only been hindered by limitations imposed by computer processing power. With online basic solutions such as createhdr.com appearing, HDR is becoming more available to the masses.

It’s easy to see why so many people are fans of HDR when you compare side by side what the original image would have looked like if left untouched.

I tried createhdr.com with an image I’d taken whilst walking around Nottingham and I must say that the effect, although not on par with professionally developed HDR, is surprisingly pleasing.

The possibilities of this type of photo manipulation are endless from a simple tweak to bring out the detail of the image, correct colour or create atmosphere.

Right through to creating surreal scenes such as the ones below that look more like illustrations barely retaining their photographic element.