The gleaming brass of the horn section during a New York State School Music Association (NYSSMA) performance in Grahamsville. 

A rustic homemade swing hanging from a tree in Equinunk.

A flag fluttering in the breeze in Fremont Center. 

The Easter Bunny waving from a bench in Callicoon.

My corgi’s butt captured as she walked away from me across our backyard. 

These are just a few of the scenes that have made their way onto stock photo sites in the past year and then out into the world, purchased by the kinds of people who need a very specific photo at a particular time but don’t have the time — or the means — to capture it themselves. 

You’ve seen these photos, hundreds of thousands of them, over the years. 

You’ve seen them on ads, on websites, on those “to current occupant” brochures that arrive in your mailbox. 

The way it works is simple enough. Photographers like me upload their images to sites like Getty Images where they join an enormous visual library waiting to be discovered. Someone designing a brochure for the local animal shelter or building a website for a small business types a few keywords into a search bar and, for a fee, downloads the perfect image. 

The buyer gets the photo they need without hiring anyone, renting any equipment, or driving anywhere.

The stock photo site gets a chunk of money. 

The photographer gets a small cut — and I do mean small. We're often talking pennies on the dollar — sometimes literally. But those pennies have a funny way of adding up, particularly if you happen to have captured something specific enough that only a handful of images exist in the entire library.

Which brings me back to those gleaming brass horns. 

A few years ago, I began to experiment with stock photography sites, submitting a few anonymous images — photos that don’t show any particular, recognizable person — for consideration. Slowly, the library of images accepted by the stock sites grew, as I learned the ins and outs of the process, learned how to select the images most likely to hit that sweet spot for acceptance. 

As my collection of images on sale has grown, so too has the list of photos that have been purchased.

The most popular? Those brass horns being played by anonymous Sullivan County high schoolers, the lights of the Tri-Valley auditorium bouncing off the golden metal. It’s been downloaded dozens of times in the past few years, across multiple stock sites, and popped up across the internet, from a local newspaper in Riverhead, New York, to an Austrian concert hall.

This is the magic of photography. 

Somewhere in Austria, someone needed a photo of a brass section and found it in a high school auditorium in Grahamsville, New York. They don’t know where the photo was taken. They don’t need to know. They just needed that photo in that moment to tell their story. But I know where each photo was taken, what was happening in that moment, where in our little corner of the world it was captured. 

And each time I get a notification that another photo was downloaded, I remember a NYSSMA concert on a wintry March afternoon in Grahamsville, a flag fluttering in the warm spring breeze in Fremont Center, or an Easter bunny waving in Callicoon.