YouTube is a Grind
I started making tutorial videos and sharing them on Youtube about 9 years ago. In that time, I have shared 1100+ videos covering many different photo editing apps. It’s been a blast. I’ve enjoyed it so much, and have met a lot of people in person who have watched my videos. It’s given me opportunities I could only have dreamed about. I’ve honestly loved it. It’s been amazing.
It’s thrilling to work through a photo, discover some useful thing that I can share, build a video about it and share it with the world. It’s thrilling to interact with everyone who comments and engages with my videos. It’s still thrilling to hit the Publish button and watch a video go live after all the work I put into it. I absolutely love the entire process.
It’s also utterly exhausting at times.
From the outside, it may not seem like a lot goes into a 10-12 minute video. I mean, it’s only 10-12 minutes long. How much work can it be? This isn’t some feature-length production we’re talking about. I don’t even do a lot of fancy editing of my videos with transitions, etc. But you may be surprised at just how much work it really is to produce something of value, every week (and sometimes more than one per week).
My point of view here is from someone making photo editing videos, with a desire to provide useful and insightful tips and tricks in each video. I want to make something that adds value to the viewer in some way. That’s the goal. I’m not sure I always achieve it, but that is the goal. It’s harder than it sounds, honestly.
The way I approach this is via the following 5 steps (though not always in that order, actually):
Ideation/Exploration
Rehearsal
Filming/Editing
Thumbnail
Title
Ideation/Exploration
First comes the ideation. You have to come up with an idea. Your video has to be about something. You have to have a point. You can’t just record the same old boring editing steps every time, but with a different picture. It has to be informative, interesting, educational, entertaining, etc. Not all of those, but at least one of them. Ideally more than one, though.
How do you get an idea? You edit photos. Then you edit more photos, and more photos. You experiment with different ideas and techniques, in hopes that your end result is visually satisfying, and the process to get there is informative. You spend time working on things, thinking about things, trying things, and then figuring out if it will make a decent video. It’s not quick, trust me. I often work on something that I think will make a good video, but then decide that it won’t for some previously unseen reason.
Ideation is hard. Sure, I have a lot of ideas (and gobs of notes I’ve made that I source from), and get lots of ideas from my viewers, but they are not all video-worthy ideas. You have to constantly think of new, different, and/or better ways to do things. It’s great for helping you learn how to get the most out of an app, but it’s hard to constantly be thinking about these things, instead of just trying to edit a beautiful photo and get in the flow. My flow is very start/stop because I’m not just concerned with the final edited result. I’m trying to figure out if something I have done along the way will work as part of a video, so I’m always sort of doing two things at once.
Rehearsal
When I do land on an idea that works and have a good example photo to go with it, I have to write down all of my editing steps and then rehearse the edit itself a few times so that I am reasonably fluid in the video. While this isn’t hard, it does take some time to make sure I know all the steps, even though I often refer to my notes while filming the video (there’s no way I can memorize all of the steps). I usually reset the photo back to the unedited raw file 2-3 times and walk through the edit again before ever filming. While I don’t script my videos, this rehearsal process is similar in that I have certain, specific things that I want to talk about during specific parts of the video, so I do have to make note of that and be prepared for it (and practice).
Filming/Editing
Filming is pretty easy, especially due to having rehearsed the edit beforehand. I have software that captures my screen and audio (a Yeti mic plugged into my Macbook Pro), and I have a small Sony camera which captures my talking head portion. I merge and sync them in my software, and then edit as needed. I always mess up something when filming, or trip over my words, or something hangs up in my editing app, or something looks different than I remember it during rehearsal, and I have to pause and start a section over - so all of that gets edited out. Every now and then something bigger goes wrong and I have to stop recording and start over from the beginning.
Thumbnail
The other thing that is rather hard to get right is the thumbnail. It has to be eye-catching and interesting in order to get attention on Youtube, and that part can be hard too. I always try to show a “before and after” of the photo I am editing in the video, because I believe in truth in advertising.
But I don’t always do that, because the image I am editing doesn’t always work well for a thumbnail (even though it works well for the topic), so in that case I have to start from scratch and ideate around that too, and then find a new image. That can take a while.
I also take the image and build the thumbnail in Keynote. This generally involves a bit of customization to make it look the way I want it to look, with the product logo for the app I am using in the video, along with any text I want to use. This all gets adjusted more times than you would believe (increase text size, reduce text size, change the text, change the font, move various elements around, etc).
This part can take quite a while. I usually try 3-4 different versions before I decide on one that I am going to use.
Title
The other important part is the title of the video. Again, this goes through many different iterations before I finalize it. I try to wordsmith these to get the most impact in the fewest words, but it’s not easy. I get help thanks to ChatGPT but still, it can take a while as I try to communicate the value of a 12 minute video in 50 characters or less.
It needs to be interesting enough to click on without being sensationalized or too click-bait sounding (in my opinion), and of course I am trying to attract a viewer. Usually the sensationalized titles and thumbnails work better, but I don’t like to do those. So this is a fine line to walk, a delicate dance if you will.
All together, this entire process of creating a video from start to finish is roughly 4-5 hours per video, and sometimes a bit more. Every now and then, everything falls into place easily and it’s a quick 2 hours or so. But that’s pretty rare.
Parting Thoughts
I Do This In My Free Time
Keep in mind, I have a day job - I’m not just sitting around making videos and having fun. I’m doing this stuff at night and on the weekends. During the height of Covid when no one was going anywhere, I was making 3-4 videos every week. It was crazy, but there wasn’t much else to do LOL so I did it. But I don’t ever plan to make that many per week again. It was too much, and I burned out after a while.
These days, I make 1 and every once in a while 2 videos per week. I skip a week here and there depending on what else is going on in life, but I try to get something out each week. My goal is one video per week, but I want it to be a good video, and not just something that I throw together. It’s a big chunk of my free time and I do it willingly, because I love it. It honestly is fun for me, even all these years later. And of course I love interacting with the community there.
Making an Income
By the way, I’m not getting paid to make these videos. I have done maybe 5 sponsored videos in all these years, so yes I was paid for those (and I disclose it every time), but none of the others. I get emails almost every week from companies that I have (mostly) never heard of, asking me to make a video for them, and offering up some form of payment for it.
I turn all of these down, and will continue to do so. Most are unknown to me and would never make sense for me or my channel. I only consider sponsored videos from products that I would use myself, that I think will add value to anyone watching and that I feel comfortable sharing with my audience, and of course that I have an actual interest in.
And yes I do earn some money from Youtube ads, and from affiliate sales, but if I worked out the hourly rate it would not be that much. It’s definitely not something you can depend on, either. It can fluctuate wildly.
Final Thoughts
Everything I have written about here, and all the work that goes into my YouTube channel is ok by me, and I am not complaining, because I do all of this willingly. Despite everything I said above it’s still a process and activity that I seriously enjoy. I love figuring out creative things to do with photos and sharing that with everyone. It’s fun, and it’s a great escape from some of the drudgery of day to day life. I love being creative and trying to help others improve their photography. I love editing photos. I love talking about editing photos. I love photography.
I’m not even sure why I wrote all of this. I guess it was just on my mind, and this is the place where I share my random scribblings. For those of you who showed up here and read this drivel, thank you. And of course thank you to all of those who show up and watch my videos. I sincerely appreciate you!
Now I guess I should get back to working on the next one! 😀 See you soon!
