Our friends at junta42.com do more than match us up with prospective clients. In their recent webinar, they taught us a new parlor game with a useful business message.

To play, go to iStock, one of many online sources for royalty-free stock images, and type “bacon” into the search bar. Guess how many images you’ll pull up. Answer: 2,500.

Want to try a few others?

• Vienna, Austria: 2,186
• Wiener schnitzel, 156
• Mediterranean Sea, 20,020
• Gaza Strip, which sits astride it, 42. Huh? Try a newsier source like http://apimages.ap.org. Be prepared to pay more.

But some topics apparently fail to interest photographers, at least those who sell via iStock. We got 18 results for dude ranch and 19 results for ranch dressing. Oh, well.

One take-home message from this brief examination is that people have mastered the use of the digital camera. Another is that your aerial shot of a baked potato with sour cream and chives may be on some publications maven’s wish list. The perfect image for any given story is out there.

There’s another message, with possibly more powerful overtones. The most popular download (14,622) over the past three months portrays a child holding a dandelion. To us, this says “possibility” and “innocence,” both of which are in short supply these days.

We invite you to share your own stock-photo observations with us, whether quirky, profound, or pragmatic.

Posted in Design