With so many stock photos sold, it’s impossible for me to track their usage. When I do find out about there usage is usually through one of the models from the shoot. Someone they know will see the image, recognize the model, then the model will forward the link to me. There is a better way to find images. I heard about Google’s image search and decided to run some of my stock photos through it to find them on the web. You may be familiar with searching for an image by typing in text in the search box but you may not know that you can also drop in an image and Google will try to find that image across the web. I tried this with a few of my stock images. Most of my stock images I found were the typical use scenario I expected, but one did strike me as quite unordinary. I photographed a biker and a scraggly man and released the images as stock. I was curious to see how they were ever used. I found them on a post at Aviary. They were humorously mixed with an image of Emma Watson of Harry Potter in an “emergency sexandectomy.” I think it’s something you just have to see to understand.
And the video showing how it was made.
Oh my! Needless to say, I could never have imagined this use scenario and I’m glad I took the time to search. The bottom of the post explains the composite was not done in Photoshop but in Aviary’s web tool. Also if you want to search for any of your images through Google’s image search click the camera at the end of the search box then upload a pic or drop in a url of a hosted file. Unfortunately, although I was able to find many instances of the original Emma Watson image, I could not find the original source to give credit to the photographer.