The perfect image is not always easy to come by when trying to design a site. High resolution graphics without watermarks are especially hard to find for free so we have listed some free stock sites below:

Stock.xchng – This site holds thousands of photos which are accessible after signing up for a free account.  Stock.xchng also includes a fairly large tutorial section which is available without an account.  

Stock Vault – Stock Vault is easy to use and has many useful additions including articles, links, blogs, and tutorials.  Not only that, but it acutally has a decent design.  Cheers to Stock Vault!

DexHaus – The site name is obviously not English (for that matter I have no idea what language it is in) but the rest of the website is.  Albeit the slow load time, DexHaus has a great selection of photography and a cool way of displaying it.  

Kave Wall – This texture site has amazing images and also fits into the category of great organization.  

Light Matter : Even though the site is fairly small, the pictures offered here are of amazing quality and the oddities section has some neat images that may be of interest.  

Morgue File – It might just be me but this site looks remarkably similar to Flickr.  Morgue file offers tons of images but you have to sort through the good and not as good quality.  Don’t bother using the browse by category system; it’s a pain to sort through.  

Free Photos Bank –  This site has a good variety of quality photos.  The selection is not focused solely on nature but offers technology, architecture and other types of images.  

Image Base – This free photo site has an easy download system (right click + save as) and is entirely free.  There are no restrictions other than using the images for unlawful reasons.  It also offers a nice set of nature-themed PowerPoint Templates.  

Pixel Perfect Digital – Although the site may seem daunting at first, once you figure out how to navigate it, you will find a nice selection of pictures.  Their digital art category includes a variety of renderings which make great textures and the site also has a useful links page.  

Free Digital Photos – A great source for free images, this site has high quality picutres.  Two setbacks are that free photos are  only 640(px) x 427(px) and all images used on websites require a link back to http://www.freedigitalphotos.net.

Some other resource sites you might want to look at are DeviantArt and Flickr

Do remember that it doesn’t hurt to take the old Google Image search path if nothing works.  Also, be sure to always read the Terms of Service or face the wrath of copyright infringement.  Best of luck from Lateral Code!