Stock photography is a tricky thing. There’s several kinds of stock; free stock, cheap stock, expensive stock, and commissioned stock. Hell, there’s probably more but that list is enough for now. Commissioned stock is the best if you don’t want your work to look like someone else’s. That’s great – but most of the time fairly costly. Then there’s .. well the rest. Anytime you use stock from one of the zillion stock photography sites you run the risk that someone out there will use the same photo as you.

I’ve seen it a bunch of times in the last few years and yes, I’ve even been the “victim” once –in the same event program, nevertheless. I was in charge of creating an ad for our company for a specific music event’s program. Well, I went to my favorite -affordable- stock site, iStockphoto. Looking up this music event, I had very limited choice as the event has a very specific theme. I found a nifty image, an illustration to be exact, and whipped up the ad. It went over well with my bosses and coworkers – great! Submitted the ad. Done.

When I finally saw the program I flipped through and just a few pages after our ad was another ad for a local company… and there was the same illustration, slightly different use, but easily recognizable. Oy.

The world didn’t stop, buildings did not crumble, and nobody really cared. Well, I cared a bit.

The last few I’ve noticed; Twitter’s bird is from iStock and it’s used in a popular Wordpress template and Overstock.com used an image of a well-dressed woman we used in an ad about 4 years ago for a local boutique. It’s stock, it’s supposed to be used – it’s not a big deal. Nobody else will notice it.

The other day I was doing some research and checked out Xerox’s website. For whatever reason, I lingered on the homepage for just enough time to see the photo being used after the purple squiggles swish by. Don’t want to linger there yourself? Here – check out this site instead. It’s the same photo. Hee.

More recently and in much more of a spotlight than any of the examples above, Esquire has run a cover shot of Obama that ran on the cover of Time only 6 months ago. Granted, the photos are most likely different yet from the same photoshoot (*very* slight differences) – at first glance, to the majority of people out in the world – they’re the same shot.

Now, photos of famous/celebrity types are going to be used and reused, this is not the first time it’s happened. But for such a prominent magazine, man, I’d think Esquire would be pretty embarrassed. Rob Haggart at A Photo Editor lists the likely reasons the Esquire cover shot made the press. My favorite is:

3. The writer or fact checker asked questions that caused the PR Director to use the Cover shoot as ransom to make changes to the story. You always save the hard questions and fact checking the difficult quotes till after all the reporting is done and the cover is in the can. If you don’t they can hold the shoot as ransom to make changes. If that happened here, Granger likely told them to go to hell and so went the cover shoot.