Back in February, I wrote about the ideas you can sometimes get from objects in a junk shop – specifically a typewriter which cost me $15. I was asked to report on success – did it pay it’s way? After 2 months of sales, I can report that it did! Total earnings from the typewriter shots now that my iStock results are available are $47 – so a solid $32 profit! I must admit that the sale that pushed it...
The earlier posts on this subject have covered the basics of what stock video is, and then more detail on the sort of clips I have been producing. Now I’ll focus on some details about how I go about getting the clips taken, edited and uploaded to the five agencies I support: Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, Pond5, Storyblocks and iStock. The first step obviously starts in the camera. I’ve been choosing to shoot in the PAL standard of 23.98. There are...
A friend with a deep portfolio on images on his hard drive recently asked me if I had any advice on breaking through the barrier of “just too much to do and not enough time” to get started in selling these images on the various stock agencies. Often, being faced with keywording and describing hundreds or thousands of images, we tend to just put it off for another day! After all, this part of the process is the most difficult...
I’m still working through all my images from Spain and Italy and just processed one that made me thing that it would make a good quick tip if you come across the same conditions. I was at an overlook over a square in Rome and the sun was straight ahead and directly in my field of vision. It was late in the afternoon and the shadows in the square would make for an interesting shot and so I wanted to...
Today is one of those days that only comes round very rarely. Once in a blue moon as my parents used to say. Total sales for the day are a cool $200. Why? Three very nice sizeable sales! First Shutterstock with a pretty boring shot I took in the English Lake District on a cloudy day for $69.81: Hardly a fine art print, I’m afraid! But then Alamy came in with a sale at $89 gross which netted me $44.50
March turned out to be a pretty decent month for earnings, with a total of $3099. Now that I am focusing more on video, I can report that $198 of that was from video sales! For a change, here is a quarter view of earnings with a very colorful approach to brighten your day: As you can see, the final quarter of 2017 was my best ever, but this first quarter was not far behind. Most of the sites did...
Earlier in the week I wrote the first of several posts on stock video. Today I’ll move forward to look at the sort of stock videos I’ve been taking and how successful they have been. By the way, if you haven’t read it yet, it is worth looking at the comment added by Vlad Savin to that first post. He provides a very good background to the video industry use of B-Roll to fill in gaps in their productions. It...
I’ve been promising to write about stock video for a while and so this is the first of what I plan will be a series of posts going through my approach to stock video. I don’t pretend to be an expert – in fact I still struggle a bit with the concepts of what a good stock video is – but I’ll give you my thoughts. This first post will be an explanation of what I think you should be...
Don’t the months go by so quickly these days and although I guess February is a short month it was still reasonable. January had shown quite a bump over the previous month (and the same month last year), but February – not so good! Total earnings were still pretty solid though at $2860 although for some reason nothing has yet been reported by Zoonar – perhaps there is nothing, but usually I get a few sales there each month. Here...
Did I really need to buy a new camera? Obviously no – the businessman inside me said firmly that the Sony A7r ii that I have (with 15000 shutter activations) is more than adequate for stock photography and the new model (the mark 3) has only a few enhancements. But the inner child knew that a new camera body was just what I needed and that I would be able to take higher speed videos and slow them down (only...
