Art, Pictures, and Photographs

Clip art may serve to spice up a web site, and, skillfully used, may even make a great-looking site. But unless you're very careful, or your site is aimed at children, clip art may not be suitable for the more 'serious' site. When I started building EncycloZine, I used a lot of clip art. It served well enough to get things going, but just didn't convey an atmosphere of serious authority... Can you imagine Encarta or Britannica using clip art? Not really; what you expect to see at such places is clean-looking artwork and photographs. These are much harder to come by, and you can expect to pay up to $100 or more for good stock photographs. However, there are a few sources of free or inexpensive 'quality art' on the net. Here's a few. As usual, I'd be very glad to hear of any others that you might know of!

Each of the following images is linked to a small gallery of more images from the specified source, that I particularly liked. You can of course just go straight to the source.

The Artchive is an excellent site, by Mark Harden. It features hundreds of "classic art" images, and Mark graciously allows you to use up to 6 on your own site: "You are free to use up to five or six images from the site for any personal non-profit, educational purpose. This would primarily be your personal home page, but could also be, for example, one-time use for an offline presentation. I ask that you provide credit to "Mark Harden" as the source for each scan. If the images are used on a web site, please display the credit in the form of a link to my site, i.e. "Scan by Mark Harden".

FreeFoto.com is one of the largest collections of free photographs for non-commercial use on the Internet. The comprehensive, yet easy to navigate site features 21 main sections with over 299 sub headings, including sections on Paris, France; London, England and Tuscany, Italy. The photographs are free to private users and for sale to commercial users. FreeFoto.Com contains over 5,000 images with new pictures being added every week.

NASA images generally are not copyrighted. You may use NASA imagery, video and audio material for educational or informational purposes, including photo collections, textbooks, public exhibits and Internet Web pages. This general permission does not include the NASA insignia logo (the blue "meatball" insignia), the NASA logotype (the red "worm" logo) and the NASA seal.

The NOAA photograph and image collection has been produced to help those interested in studying our natural world learn more about our oceans, the atmosphere, and the history of the pioneers who began the study of our environment in the United States. Presently there are approximately 10,000 digitized images on this site, including subjects as diverse as penguins, hurricanes, lightning, helicopters, aircraft, tornadoes, seals, dolphins, starfish, etc...

Photo.net's Stock Photography comprises 6,000 photographs, most of stunning quality. The search facility is good, while the browse facility is only categorised by years - but most of the pictures are so good its well worth a random browse through them. Photo.net is a fantastic site - not for fancy layout and tricky HTML - but for sheer breadth and depth of content. A must-see for keen photographers! There's also some web development stuff, and Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing - the online version of their book. Alex is the dog. The site is run by Philip Greenspun of MIT, and Travels with Samantha fame. Copyright Notice.

EluZions by EncycloZine (my own site) are colorful optical illusions that you may add to your own pages. Please either link the image to EluZions or EncycloZine, or provide a text link.

At left: the concentric circles distort the straight lines of the square, pulling them inwards.

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