Approximately 300 hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube every minute—and the vast majority of it is created by regular users who capture personal experiences with Go Pros, smartphones and laptop cameras. So prolific is this trend of user-generated content that millennials are now sometimes referred to as Generation C, for Generation Content.
Peruse enough mainstream news sites and you’re likely to eventually see the Getty Images label tagged to the photography featuring on some of the stories. This is because the company today serves as an image provider for many publications throughout the world. Due to this affiliation with news, it’s important for Getty to provide imagery that accompanies current affairs suitably.
Over the last few years, Getty Images has been tracking the type of imagery that companies prefer to use when it comes to representing their brands. And what the company has found, is that brands are shifting from the stereotypical stock types and opting for more varied and diverse alternatives. And these trends are also being reflected in terms of the imagery that brands are using to depict love in 2015. Rebecca Swift, the director of creative planning at iStock, shares her views on how Kiwi and Aussie representations of love are shifting.
As evidenced by the likes of Women Laughing Alone with Salad and Completely Unusable Stock Photos, stock imagery is a fairly easy target. Enter The Stock Photobomber, who inserts himself into shots for comedic effect.
Speaking during the Cannes Lions festival earlier this year, Getty Images founder Jonathan Klein uses a series of iconic images to illustrate the intrinsic potential of an image to move the viewer and how photography can, in fact, play an integral role in shaping the way we see the world.
Sometimes poignant, sometimes inspirational, the 2013 awards compilation from Getty Images offers a series of snapshots that captures the highs and lows of the human experience in a way that is only possible through the laconic medium of photography. Portraits of animal cruelty, political snapshots, sporting action pics, war photography and eerie juxtapositions appear alongside the more commonly seen photographs of natural wonders, artistic poses and press shots.
From Women Laughing Alone With Salad to Awkward Stock Photos, plenty of time can be wasted looking at ridiculous stock imagery. Getty Images has a whole host of them at its disposal as well and it’s chosen ten of the most bizarre. See the slideshow here.