This photographer decided to sell his photos – the results will amaze you!

OK – sorry for the clickbait title. I always avoid clicking on posts like this, but I guess some people must click on them otherwise we wouldn’t see them everywhere! However, the results this month will amaze you – at least I was pretty pleased with them! Historically, April has marked the start of the down months for my stock earnings – a slump that lasts until August. But this month has knocked that tradition out of the ballpark with an overall earnings total of $3460. My best result ever for monthly sales. Here is the chart:

Almost $1000 more than in April 2017. That has maintained the steady growth pattern that started around last August and has been generating best month after best month ever since.

What were the highlights? Well, some really nice big single sales on Shutterstock. I talked about one of the good days early in the month when I had combined sales of $200, but then I had two other days in the month where I almost hit that total. One was due to two sales of the same video clip on Adobe Stock (for $59 and $70):

Not a fantastic sunset, but it obviously met a need (twice!) This was taken from the back of a cruise ship going across the Atlantic. The camera (with 4K video) was set on a tripod, but even so the horizon was rolling a bit as the ship moved through the waves, but the Warp Stabilizer effect in Premiere Pro straightened it out. Apart from that, this is pretty much straight from the camera.

Then I sold one version of my surfboard image on Shutterstock for $113 which made for another solid day:

This “walk-by” shot that I made several years ago has definitely paid for that vacation!

Between the agencies, Shutterstock really broke the records with a total of almost $1100 – the highest since early 2015. That sounds good, but I have probably doubled the number of images on line in that time! iStock was great again – $576, just $2 short of the March earnings. And then Adobe came in with a new record of $555. I gave up on Fotolia at one point in the past – just goes to show how you don’t know what is going to happen with these agencies! Finally Canva is a solid reliable earner, coming in with $282.

Videos have played a decent role this month with total sales of $268. Pond5 has been a disaster area with total sales (all images) of just $15, but Storyblocks broke out of hibernation with a video sale for $47 early in the month:

My video earnings have been growing nicely:

I’ve been pretty busy with my uploads through April. I took another cruise in March from San Juan to Barcelona with a few days in Rome, and so came back with many images and some videos (including the one mentioned above). As a result, I spent a lot of this month finishing, describing, keywording and describing those images:

That resulted in the following totals per agency at the end of April:

Well, that is all for now. I’m not sure if I can keep up this pace of earning, but it would certainly make for a nice 2018! Good luck with your own endeavors!