Professional Pictures Online

When advertising art directors or public relations firms need picturesÂ….they turn, very often, to what is called stock photography. Professional images that they pay to use. A company called Photodisc is making libraries of images available online at a site called powerpics.com Photodisc's Katherine JamesÂ…

"The traditional target for PhotoDisc customers has been the creative professional but certainly what we've found in our customer set is, because we provide such easy access to photographs at such a reasonable price, the audience has broadened significantly beyond just the creative professional into a much broader business and consumer audience."

One of the great features of the site, is the search capability. Type in a subject that you want to find a photograph of and it will retrieve the available images. Using OpenPix technology developed by Hewlett Packard, you can zoom in or out to get a good look at the pictureÂ…

"Once they've found an image they're interested in, of course it's relatively small, thumbnail size on the web. What OpenPix lets us do is provide a way for users to zoom in and take a good close look at all the details. So they can zoom in again and again and again and get down to a very fine level of detail and make sure the picture is what they want before they purchase it online."

The pictures cost as little as 5 dollars. Higher resolution photos for full page printing are 9 dollars. You can check out some free samples at the Powerpics site.