…and the number one reason why you should pay for stock photography: So you can get rid of that pesky watermark. Here’s a screenshot of a flash ad I spotted on allrecipes.com for the magic diet pill vendor curbyourcravings.com.

If you look really closely, you’ll see something other than a Hoodia patch plastered over this tummy:

Yep, it’s a watermark. And now that I know which stock phography site they stole the image from, it’s not hard to find the source image.

While Shutterstock operates on a membership fee rather than a pay-per-image model like iStockphoto, their prices are far from expensive when you compare them to traditional stock photography. I guess the moral to this story is pay for your stock images. Getting rid of the watermark isn’t the REAL number one reason to paying for good photos, but it will certainly keep you from looking like a cheapskate. If you don’t do enough design work to justify $199/mo for a membership to Shutterstock, then go to iStockphoto. If you can’t afford to pay $1/photo, check out stock.xchng, but don’t steal images.