What do I do with all the aerial stock photos and video I take from Bendigo Aerial? This is a common question I get asked frequently online. The answer is I sell it as stock footage on popular stock photo websites and on Bendigo Aerial.
I collect on average 10 terabytes of aerial video and stock photos every year. The footage is currently stored on amazon cloud servers and locally on backup hard drives. That’s every single photo, video and edit I capture using drones, canon cameras and Gopro’s. No – I don’t throw or delete any footage out. It’s getting to a point where it’s almost impossible to store the footage locally on hard drives.
My Process to Backup and My Hard Drive Solution
My process currently is to backup all footage to a local drive. I love using the LaCie Rugged Mini hard drive solutions. I usually buy the LaCie Rugged Mini 2TB version when on sale. The prices range from $150.00 to $180.00 per drive. These are a great option to store your photo and video backups locally. When editing the footage I always transfer them to my local SSD for faster operation. However, for storage LaCie Rugged is a great hard drive to store footage as backups. Especially when travelling and backing up multiple projects.
Video – Shutterstock, Adobe Stock and Pond 5
For stock footage, I only rely on 3 websites to sell videos. Shutterstock, Adobe Stock and Pond 5 are my favourite sites. Lately video stock footage has been selling at a higher price and more consistently than images. This is probably due to the shift in social media, marketing and a higher emphasis on high definition video to sell products. After I made a few sales with video, I started to upload more clips since the payout was higher than photos. Today movie companies, tv shows, media managers and general consumers buy my stock photos and video for their productions.
How I sell Stock Photos and Video on Stock Photography Websites
I’ve started uploading footage to the above 3 stock video sites. Each clip needs to be indexed, catalogued and added manually to each site which consumes time. I’ve been doing this on my spare time and I’m guessing it will take me a further 6 to 9 months to get the majority of the clips to appear on these sites. Speaking to experts and trying to educate myself on stock footage it appears if you want to make a living from selling stock footage, you need to upload around 1000+ quality clips for consideration. The more stock footage you have the higher the chance of a clip getting sold.
Buying Stock Photos for Commercial Use
For stock images, I sell them on my own website for $49.95 per image. Generally, I sell more images from my own website than the stock image sites since customers looking for images find my images more targeted for their needs. Example by location “Central Victoria”. Also buying it at a fixed price is generally much cheaper than the majority of the stock photography sites.
If you haven’t seen the collection, please view the stock photo gallery. Head over to Bendigo Aerial to buy aerial stock footage directly from our site. You can purchase photos, videos or movies with a full flexible digital licence for your business. You can find out more on pricing, licensing agreements and how to access all our footage from our site.
If you have further questions regarding stock footage or how I prepare the footage, please get in contact with me.