ChristianPhotos.Net Launches a Free Stock Photography Service for Churches

MIAMI, FLORIDA, October 3: ChristianPhotos.Net announced today a free stock photography service for Christian churches and organizations. The new service, available for registered users, offers free, high-resolution photographs that can be used in flyers, posters, web sites, or other forms of publishing. “Churches want to develop and maintain a positive image within their local community. ChristianPhotos.Net helps churches around the world to create this image by providing photos for all their promotional needs,” says Jukka Paavilainen, founder of the service.

Larger churches are able to pay thousands of dollars for their publications, while smaller churches have limited resources. ChristianPhotos.Net is targeting those smaller churches that cannot afford professional photo services, but want to produce high quality publications. Paavilainen said, “I was surprised to find that there were no free stock photography services available for churches through the Internet. Printed publications require high resolution graphics, and ChristianPhotos.Net is the only service that offers these free of charge.”

The idea for creating a free photo service was born when a local church asked Paavilainen to shoot photos for their monthly newspaper. Realizing that there are thousands of churches that would benefit from the same photos, Paavilainen went to work to make them available to others. Some time later ChristianPhotos.Net was launched for beta testing. The site is now open for all registered users. The only stipulation is that users promise to use the photos exclusively for Christian publications. When asked, Paavilainen stated that, “Yes, this is truly a leap of faith. Downloading of high-resolution photos requires a great deal of expensive bandwidth and advertising is the only source of income. However, I am confident that a way to keep the doors open will be provided in the future.”

ChristianPhotos.Net has ambitious plans to reach churches around the world. “Anyone is welcome to participate in this project by translating the web site into other languages when the new internationalization framework is ready. I expect that by 2006, ChristianPhotos.Net will be available in several languages,” says Paavilainen. “In addition to that, other photographers have an opportunity to add appropriate photos to the site. We need to create an active community of people to move this site forward into the future.”

Visit www.ChristianPhotos.Net for more information.