You have a couple options if you want to buy photos online. You can find professional photographers, visit their sites, and purchase from there. This method usually is the most expensive but often you get very high quality photos.
The second option which is easier, cheaper, and often has photos just as high quality is to buy photos online through stock photo agencies. These stock agencies basically sell other photographers for different price ranges based on the size you want to download it as. The bigger the image dimensions, the more pricey the image.
The two best places to buy photos online that have a wide selection of many types of images are Getty Images and Thinkstock
. Both are loaded with a wide variety of image sizes which is great. If you are looking for smaller sizes for web or mobile usage or larger sizes for print usage, they have both.
Getty images is a well established stock photo agency and has been around for quite some time. They have very high quality images from well known professional photographers. Often times the images there are used for press releases, high traffic news sites, book covers, etc.
As of now there is a coupon you can use below which will save you 15% if you are a new customer to Getty Images.
NEW CUSTOMER – save 15% at GettyImages.com. Use coupon code XH2PC46N during checkout.
Because of the high quality and professional photographers used at the stock agencies above, the price for images can be steep. There are micro stock agencies which sell a variety of images for lower prices. One of the most pupular is Shutterstock.
The micro stock agencies tend to have more “stock photo” looking images rather than artistic photography. Micro stock agencies are great for websites, eBooks, banner ads, and other small sized mediums.