HDVideoPro

I, too, shoot primarily on the weekends. I recently reached 1000 clips online, and make a decent monthly income from P5 (enough to cover my expenses, but not enough to retire).

I started about a year ago, and every month, my overall total (from all my agencies) has steadily increased.

While weekends are saved for shooting, weekDAYS (evenings) are saved for the tedious task of uploading and keywording. So be prepared to work quite a bit for the immediate future to get your portfolio up to decent numbers.

vjphotog,

I schedule stock shoots through out the year. When it gets colder and drab, I stay in front of the computers and edit/FTP/keyword. About 50% of my time is now dedicated to stock. I reinvest in equipment and software updates. On the road, I'm rarely without my camera. The other 50% is on location freelance shooting: news, documentaries, sports, corporate, etc. This is all I do and have done for nearly 25 years. I love the industry and the people in it.

cheers,
Francois

Congratulations for the three interviewed!

God bless us all!

Thanks for the comments... Stockshooter, you shoot the things I'd like to shoot, but unfortunately I'm located in a small market for professional video. Besides the TV stations, there's not too many opportunities here. I'm going to give it a try, but not sure how it's going to work out. But shooting stock is great because of web delivery. Ideally, that's what my entire business model would be these days. Web delivery opens up so many options.

My only video shooting now is for stock. Since I live in a small town of less than a thousand people and the closest town of 10,000 or more is 40 miles away there is no need to anything but stock. I have found that for the first couple years almost all income is reinvested in better equipment. My internet is really to slow, the ftp is running 24/7 and then I can only get about 10-15 new clips sent in each day. I have a backlog of a couple hundred clips waiting.