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Corbis Makes High Quality Photography Available to Media Companies, Photographers, and Advertisers

Corbis is dedicated to bringing high quality art photographs and putting them online. The service is for anyone who has a passion or is in business in photography or whose work has to do with photography. Registration for this service is free, but you can purchase photographs for fee and can sell your photography as well.

The signing in process for Corbis is rather smooth. To register for Corbis and create an account, you need to first type in a username and type in and retype your desired password. The password must be in between 8 to 20 characters. The password must be case sensitive and must contain at least one number. You also need to provide both your mailing and billing address, your email address, your company name, choose a position, and then you need to read the terms and privacy policy and click the checked box stating that you agree with the terms and click on the register button. Once you have registered into Corbis and created your account, you need to wait for your confirmation email to come, and it comes within seconds. Once you have gotten your confirmation email, you are in.

Once you have signed into your account, you can choose from a whole list of categories of photography on the site. Some of the categories that you can choose from include agriculture, animals, architecture, backgrounds, business, concepts, food, healthcare, health and beauty, and much more. You can also search for photographs by alphabetical order. You can also choose what photographs you want to buy. You can buy photographs that are rights managed, which means that you might not have the right publish those photographs, or if you are given publishing rights to those photographs, they might be limited and you might need to accredit the name of the author or publisher along with publication.

Royalty free photos can be published at your will. These are photos that are intended to be used in advertisements, promotional sites, motivational, etc.

You can also choose from illustrations for certain motifs. In the illustration list is a whole collection of beautiful hand-drawn artwork that is intended to be used as illustrations for themes in certain publications. Some of these pieces of artwork even look like classic masterpieces and are professionally done.

The next list of photo genres that you can choose from is the documentary genre, which is a collection of photography and artwork for travel, news, culture, nature, technology, etc.

Another genre you can choose from is the fine arts genre, which holds a collection of fine museum quality artwork. Some of the photos of the artwork are taken from some of the world’s top art museums.

There are other genres also available on the Corbis website that subscribers can subscribe to.

Coming back to choosing a photograph to buy from Corbis. First, you want to choose from one of the genres listed above. For example, if you return back to the royalty free artwork, you can choose from one of the choices in the list. For example, suppose you like nature or the natural motif. First click on the royalty free link and you will come across the list of different themes that are available. There are several choices that could fit that theme. You can choose from animals or nature. If you click on the animals link, you will see that to the right of the original list there is a more detailed list with what types of animal themes you can choose from. You can choose from either animal attitudes, animal farm, animals and wildlife, etc. If you are looking for nature, etc. If you are interested in nature and would like to have animals in the scene, you should choose animals and wildlife.

Once you have chosen your category to the final subcategory, you will find an amazing variety of photos available to browse. As your mouse hovers over each picture, a popup will appear that will show you the image and give you the information about the image, in the case of royalty free photography, the author’s name is not published. However, the information will describe the name of the animal and where it what photographed or the natural habitat of the animal is.

To view the photograph up close and not in thumbnail form, you can click on that photograph’s thumbnail and another window will open with a larger image. Here you have the option to browse the photo closer and in this window you can even find out who the author of that photograph is. It will also tell you whether you have the right to publish that photograph or not. You also have the option to buy the photograph if you wish to do so.

If you choose to buy the photograph, all you need to do is to click on the shopping cart icon. If you want to view your shopping cart, click on the shopping cart with the arrow and the content of the window will change to shopping information. At the top right hand corner of the window, you will see the number of items in your shopping cart and you can click on the cart button to view what is in your shopping cart.

Buying a photograph or artwork from Corbis is different from other e-commerce sites. In the conventional e-commerce site, the prices are already set. With Corbis, you need to price the photograph that you want to purchase. Under the thumbnail appears a link that says “Price now.” To get a price on that photograph, you need to click on that link and then the content of the window will change, giving you several options with different sizes of the photographs and the prices. For example, in this photograph, the sizes are measured in both pixels and in inches. The top option shows the photograph with the size of 427 pixels by 640 pixels or five inches by eight inches with the price being $55. The second option shows the photograph to be 853 pixels by 1280 pixels or eleven by 17 inches. You will notice that the price of this size of the same photograph will be more expensive at $100. The other one has a smaller size but a higher quality and of course more expensive with the price of $230. To choose a price, you need to click on the option that has the price that you are willing to pay. Once you have chosen your price, you can click on the Update my cart button and the shopping cart will appear with the price that you have chosen. The defect of Corbis is trying to get the price into your shopping cart and continue to check out. There is no option on how to be able to price the photo and drag it to the priced item. Perhaps Corbis only allows certain clients to buy the photographs.

Corbis is a privately owned corporation that is based in Seattle, Washington and was founded in 1989. Currently, Corbis has two people on its management team, who are Gary Shenk, who is the company’s CEO and Barry Allen, who is the company’s CFO. Bill Gates is the sole member of the company’s board of directors.

Mr. Shenk is the company CEO and in his role, he his responsible for all of the business operations at Corbis. Furthermore, Mr. Shenk has extensive experience in marketing and advertising, giving him an amazing leading role at the company and he is one of the reasons for Corbis’s success. Before being the company’s CEO, Mr. Shenk has been working at Corbis as its president since 2006. Before then he worked at Corbis as the company’s vice president of imaging, where he was in charge of the entire imaging department and led the transformation of images to editorial, entertainment, and creative photography. Before coming to Corbis in 2003, Mr. Shenk founded one of Hollywood’s major film licensing firms, FlixMix. Mr. Shenk also had an interesting youth, first living in Moscow, Russia, where he met his wife and then went on to graduate from both Harvard and the Wharton School.

Being the CFO at Corbis, Mr. Allen oversees the entire financial operations of the company. Mr. Allen came to Corbis in 2008, where he led the company to financial success. When Mr. Allen joined the Corbis team, the brought to the company over 25 years of experience in global companies, where he held various different senior positions in both publicly traded and privately owned companies in the internet, enterprise technology, and real estate industries. Before coming to Corbis, Mr. Allen worked at Move.com, where he was also the company’s CFO. Mr. Allen was also president of Marketwave, a leading provider of corporate e-business intelligence software. Mr. Allen graduated from the University of Washington, where he received his BA in Business Administration.

Corbis does not disclose information about its investors or investments that it has received to the general public.

Corbis does have one noteworthy competitor, which is GettyImages. GettyImages is a company that provides a similar service to Corbis and has actually been around before Corbis. GettyImages is a subsidiary of Hellman & Friedman and was founded in March of 1995. GettyImages has three people on its management team and one person on its board of directors.

For more information about Corbis, click here.

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