I've been looking around the stock photo community and can find very little commercial quality stock for car photography, especially those with specific models in them (bmw, etc). Does anybody have any recommendations for this?

Hi Pablo

The only specialist car library I know of is: http://www.motoringpicturelibrary.com/

I don't think they're cheap and probably don't fall into the microstock bracket but they'd probably have what you're looking for.

But many microstock sites are steering clear of cars for copyright reasons. Istock recently had a quite controversial cull of cars, boats etc and as I shoot pre 1960 classic cars I lost some nice selling Jaguar shots.

Anyway, I hope you find what you're looking for at MPL.

Bill

pablo_pistoffo wrote:

I've been looking around the stock photo community and can find very little commercial quality stock for car photography, especially those with specific models in them (bmw, etc). Does anybody have any recommendations for this?

Pablo,

The problem that you are running into is that the cars are trademarked and so using their images as stock photography in a commercial endeavor can be risky if you have not contacted the company directly. You will find many great images of car "pieces" but generally the agency will not allow specific makes/models in the keywords because of the infringement risk. Finding a picture of a specific car is becoming hard and hard to do with microstock agencies.


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While investigating iStock earlier this year as a possible venue for selling, I noticed that since their acquisition by Getty, they have really gotten down to the nitty gritty as far as the car photos, and other stuff too. Abstracted fenders acceptable, but photos where the model etc are discernable are not. Will be interesting to see what happens to all of those 57 Chevy shots, or photos of the old Cadillac tailfins.

When doing my little survey, I also noticed that they seemed to be possibly taking down some photos. One that I had marked, a woman bottom half of face with red lipstick biting innto a red apple, was no longer available. I have a feeling that this photo was originally not released, because in reality the person is not recognizable. However it seems that since being part of Gettydom, even body parts are now requiring releases.

I have a feeling that other sites will be gravitating in this direction, especially since seeing the recent addition of Property Release forms by Dreamstime.