Dear Treasured Friends,

I hope you all enjoyed the Holidays and wish you all the very best for 2013. In the spirit of new beginnings, I wanted to invite anyone with a Google+ account to join a new community for free stock photos: [link]

For the longest time, I have to admit I did not pay much attention to Google+ versus the likes of Facebook and Twitter... but with all the other Google products that seem to pervade our web browsing experience, I see so much potential in Google+ for social networking because of how seamlessly it can be integrated with Google Search, Chrome, and Gmail to name a few.

During the Holidays, I was looking for Google+ communities to join and was surprised to see a lack of free stock photos. So I decided to create one and together with the help of the wonderfully talented , we have been working to populate it with a wide selection of images from our own galleries (450+ and counting). Needless to say, there's no shortage of content, but we would love to populate the community with more people. Anyone is welcome to join whether you just want to watch or contribute some stock of your own so that we may enrich and diversify the community even more.

I'm inviting you first, my friends on deviantArt, because I truly believe there is a very positive mindset amongst fellow artists here who like to look out for each other. That's what I want to see carried through in this new Google+ community for free stock photos, so that we start on the right foot for a leap of good faith

There are a few guidelines to keep in mind if you want to submit content into this Google+ community. Please only submit content that belongs to you or that you have permission to share. In the latter case, include credits and a link back to the source. By that token, you are welcome to include a link to your picture on deviantArt or your own website if you have one. I'm all for a little self-promotion if it will help you gain some more exposure, just please keep it short and sweet so that our audience can focus more on the photos themselves.

Please also submit to the right category and post photos of acceptable quality. That comes from a personal belief that stock photography is no different than proper photography except for the purpose it serves. As such, I want to see pictures with good focus, even lighting and no excessive grain / noise to name a few things. For copyright concerns and your own safety, also avoid submitting photos containing commercial branding (logos, trademarks, etc) or recognizable human faces unless you have a signed model release. Otherwise, you are completely free to specify your own stock terms just as you are here, but keep in mind my previous request to keep your photo descriptions short and sweet (so you may want to link to your stock terms).

All said and done, I hope you enjoy the community and hop on board for what could turn out to be something very special at the heart of the Googlesphere

The link again is [link]

Best Regards,

Nicolas Raymond