COMMERCIAL PHOTOGRAPHY 
The commercial photographic world can be broken down to:

• Advertising photography: photographs made to illustrate a service or product. These images are generally done with an advertising agency, design firm or with an in-house corporate design team.

• Fashion and glamour photography: This type of photography usually incorporates models. Fashion photography emphasizes the clothes or product, glamour emphasizes the model. Glamour photography is popular in advertising and in men's magazines. Models in glamour photography may be nude, but this is not always the case.

• Still life photography usually depicts inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which may be either natural or man-made.

• Editorial photography: photographs made to illustrate a story or idea within the context of a magazine. These are usually assigned by the magazine.

• Photojournalism: this can be considered a subset of editorial photography. Photographs made in this context are accepted as a truthful documentation of a news story.

• Portrait and wedding photography: photographs made and sold directly to the end user of the images.

• Fine art photography: photographs made to fulfill a vision, and reproduced to be sold directly to the customer.

• Landscape photography: photographs of different locations made to be sold to tourists as postcards

The market for photographic services demonstrates the aphorism "one picture is worth a thousand words," which has an interesting basis in the history of photography. Magazines and newspapers, companies putting up Web sites, advertising agencies and other groups pay for photography.
Many people take photographs for self-fulfillment or for commercial purposes. 
Organizations with a budget and a need for photography have several options: 
they can assign a member of the organization, hire someone, run a public competition, or obtain rights to stock photographs.

COMMERCIAL PHOTOGRAPHY is photography made or licensed for the purpose of selling a product, 
service or idea where fine-art photography is created as an end in itself.
Commercial photography, is also often a collaborative effort of any number of people, from two to two dozen, 
which may include an account executive, art director, stylist, photographic assistants and other specialists. 
The exception may be still-life product shots, where the photographer may work independently or with only an assistant.

Most commercial photography is assigned by an advertising agency with the selection of the photographer most often being made by the art director, 
but it may be done by the creative director, account executive or even at the request of the client. 
Just because a photograph is commercial does not need to be devoid of art. 
Many fine-art photographers and editorial photographers have done some of their best work for commercial accounts 
while often the constraint of representing the product literally has been an obstacle to creativity.