Single hyperlapses have made me around $5-600 per year, and I can film/make 5-15 of those in a day on location. Then, as you say, lots of time in post production married to the almighty Warp Stabilizer. But with each hyperlapse, I spend less time in After Effects because I learn from my mistakes (don't use 16 mm unless you have a track or you're in love with wobble ).

Of course, hyperlapses aren't the ONLY thing I do when I'm on location, so there will be lots of regular timelapses and footage that's much faster to process and get online along with that.

I didn't know it before, but now, a couple of years into it, I can say the trips do pay off (the earlier trips not as much as the recent ones because I know more now). There will always be 1-2 years when $$$ has to come from somewhere else though.

Well, none of my hyperlapses are from where I live either. I had to travel to the places people want to buy clips from. But I see it as a free trip with a bit of work involved. Can't complain.

If you don�t like video then maybe just try to do a little video with your photoshootings and see what sells.

I find video a lot more complicated than photos, you need to think differently. Just pressing the movie button is not enough.

Like others have said, camera movement and timing is vital to develop a good story and there are a million ways to shoot a simple scene.

If you don�t enjoy thinking about that, i don�t know if investing in video is worth it.

Most people i see that tried video went back to photos, because it is an easier way to make money.

A very general tip is that cinematic camera movement sells. Many photographers starting out with filming don't think about this and lock everything down on a tripod (which of course is good sometimes).

I've had the most success with clips that have (good) camera movement in them, which usually means filming with a slider or a gimbal/steadicam.

It's fascinating how something uninteresting as a photograph can be interesting with the right camera movement.

So it will be you + 1 person doing the filming? Aren't you the person filming?

I would advise to learn color correction and grading yourself to have ultimate control and keep costs down. Of course it's completely impossible to say whether it will pay off for YOU without knowing your skills, creativity etc. but of course it CAN pay off within 6-12 months if you do it right.

The GH5 will certainly provide incredible image quality in good light. I will probably upgrade from the GH4 soon myself. 10-bit footage, IBIS and 4k 60p are three amazing features. There's always the dilemma of full-frame/m43 but there simply is no convenient camera that can do it all (under $10,000, but not even then).

I'm going crazy comparing all the cameras looking at Sony (lovely image quality WHEN/IF it works), but the GH4/GH5 always end up being the best all-round alternatives for filming.

I buy gear for the love of filming/taking pictures, and don't stress too much about the income at first.

So it takes you less time to animate a video than it does to shoot a video? I'd love to know your secret!

Quote from: spike on March 20, 2017, 09:20

If it cost you 5 minutes of rendering time (if you're doing animations) and 2 minutes of keywording, then yes, yes it is.

I'd like to see any clip that takes 7 minutes to make including keywording.  My guess is it wouldn't be accepted even by the ftp program...

I've just had a crazy idea. Probably wouldn't be possible with today's technology, but all the elements of it are currently possible... so might work in the future.

At present, if you want an image of a lady, with blonde hair, sat at a table drinking a cup of coffee... you either have to draw/paint it, photograph it, or use computer graphics. What if you could have a program that will automatically generate a high resolution image with completely random colors for every single pixel. That would result in billions of quintillions of images or something, so not very feasible. 99.99999999999999% of those images would be completely unusable, but if you had every possible combination of colors in every possible combination of pixels... somewhere in there would be a pixel perfect picture of Bruce Willis riding a blue whale, Mars crashing into the Earth, and a blonde lady sat at a table drinking a cup of coffee.

So Google can recognise items, and faces and all that kind of jazz... so what if you had an element to the program that would automatically eliminate the results that don't contain recognisable objects or that don't contain a lady with blonde hair and coffee?

So the storage power, the processing power and the object recognition software aren't there yet, but say in 25, 50, 100 years It's not outside the realms of possibility that I could go into Photoshop CC 2067, go to 'file', 'generate new image' and enter the terms, "lady, blonde, table, coffee", and I'm presented with hundreds of photo-realistic images to choose from. You could then click on the green dress to say you like it, alt-click on her bag to say you don't like it... and you're presented with a a different bunch of hundreds of images to choose from.

Maybe a basic version of that is what these guys are doing with their gradient backgrounds. Maybe this is an old idea and I'm late to the party. Maybe everyone has had this thought at some point. Anyway, I should name the concept anyway, just in case, for my legacy and all that. Something classy, understated, elegant. How about "Robo-Image 3000XL Max"? Or Photorealistic Image Generation Software (PIGS).

I have some friends that sell very, very well. They worked as one photographer using 1 account.
When they started to sell for 5000$ a month they started to have problems with our country taxes so they decided to split, open one account per person and level up the whole of their portfolio.

They had the opportunity to try some "what if" experiment: they left every kind of sh*t in the main portfolio and started to upload ONLY the cream in the new accounts or to return and delete what they considered "not perfect".

The galleries with "only the best" performed DOUBLE than the one containing the best and the rest, in proportion.

So if you were thinking "is it a good idea to delete all my cr*p and leave only the best images?" ... well: yes, it is.

Why?

I don't know: I guess it's because of the way the customer see your portfolio: they see a good image, but not useful to their needs: they open your portfolio and see ONLY THE BEST, without cr*p: this probably is impressive and sells! :-)

I'm not able to do this NOW: but when I'll double my portfolio I'll do this for sure: this may halve the time for the customers to find what they want without seeing all my so-so experiments!