Free Range Stock is a community of photographers that supply free photographs to anyone who wants to use them. Their limitations are extremely loose for usage rights. You don’t even have to put a credit on the photos that you use. If you don’t see what you need, they can post your topic or theme on a board for photographers to submit photos for that category. It’s really a great site that frees up churches from ’stealing’ (did I say that?) photos from high priced stock websites.
Copying images from the internet without permission is STEALING. If you don’t know where your creative team is getting their images, check them out. Find out of they are using a pay site, or just scrounging images anywhere they can get them. If it is the latter, get them to stop, and do that by giving them this free resource and a good lecture. Your church could get in serious trouble if you are using someone else’s image without their permission. There have been multi-million dollar lawsuits over single images. For example, three years ago, our local Walmart was sued for 1 million dollars because they duplicated a professional photographers work. The photographer won hands down. Don’t think this can’t happen to a church. Use this free resource until you can get a photo budget for your creative team. Here are some stock sites I use (pay sites) that are extremely cheap. bigstockphoto.com stockxpert.com
