In both photography and videography, there's a learning pattern that everyone goes through.
Everyone starts out the same way. You go out on their first shoot, you’re very excited, you come back and look at what you’ve shot and realize how much you’ve missed and how badly you messed up.
So, you learn. You go out, determined to not make the same mistakes again. And you come back and look at what you’ve shot and realize that you’ve made entirely new mistakes this time.
You go out again, determined to learn from these mistakes, and this time you come back and discover still other mistakes that you have made, and also that some of the original mistakes have snuck back in when you weren’t looking.
This goes on for a while.
Eventually, things level off. You find that you’re able to come back from your shoots and you have everything you need. You can enter into your edits comfortably, knowing that you’re leaving your shoots with what you needed.
Then, you start to notice that these edits are getting exhausting. You have so much footage or so many photos that it’s incredibly time-consuming to edit everything. Why do you have forty-six exposures of the bride, all from the same angle and with the same expression? Why did you shoot six minutes of footage of this band playing when you know you’re only going to use an 8-second clip? Just scrolling through all of this is taking way too much of your life.
So, you get better by getting thriftier. You learn what you don’t need, and your edits become faster, and your life becomes easier.
And now, here is where I start to diverge from a lot of other photographers and videographers I run into. Because I just don’t run my shoots that way.
Look, yes, I have learned what things I only need 12 seconds of footage of, but in my mind, when I’m there and shooting, either photos or video, I want that final version to be the best version of whatever it can be. So I’ll get that first shot, the only one I need, and then I’ll keep going. I’ll hunt out some unique angles. I’ll hold on a good angle for a long time, waiting for the perfect moment or expression.
It makes the edit longer. It gives you more to discard. But I think it makes the project better, if you’re willing to do the extra work on the back end.
And getting better and knowing that you got something perfectly usable on the first shot frees you up to shoot other things you didn’t think you needed, but lots of those things become highlights of the whole shoot. Because you kept on shooting rather than leaving, saying “you got what you need.”
This is getting very Linked In, hustle culture, isn’t it? I didn’t mean it to. I actually meant for this post to be an intro to something else, though at this point, I guess I’ll have to get to that in a future post.
I think - I hope - I have been pretty aware of both my skills and my limitations, my whole career. I have watched a lot of my friends achieve incredible heights doing some of the same things I do, but much better, and I have helped a lot of people less experienced than me blossom into better filmmakers and photographers. I know what I know and what I don’t know, I know what I’m good at and what I should hand off to someone else.
This comes up sometimes when I’m shooting events with other people. I’ve had events where I split responsibilities with other people, and when we come back together, I’ve taken 440 snaps that lead to 92 good, usable photos, and they have 18 photos in total. And when we make a finished album, we end up with 65 photos and only 8 of them are the other photographer’s, and the whole shoot looks unbalanced.
And that comes from a mindset of “well, they only need a couple of shots” or “they only asked for this one thing” that I just find extremely limiting. You’re here! You’re hired to photograph this event! So shoot it. I am not impressed that you were able to get your edit done in 20 minutes. I want to give people something that ends up living forever because they liked it so much.
This is most noticeable for me on highlight videos, or camp videos. Someone said to me, early on, “every camp video is the same.” And that’s not wrong! It’s always the same shots, the same events, the same sort of music. Some of the gimmicks change, and there are some things that show up and then end up in every camp video going forward (GoPro footage! Drone shots!).
People do these sorts of videos for a while, then they feel like they grow out of them. It’s a lot of hustle without much payoff.
I just think there’s value in making something really memorable out of these moments. When I used to do videos for Rebelbase Youth, kids would tell me that they signed up to go on mission trips because the video I’d made of the last one made them want to be a part of what was going on. People would tell me they’d watch these camp videos for years and year, because they loved them so much and it always mad them feel so happy to relive the memory again.
That’s worth it to me. It’s worth the extra work to make something that means that much to people.
So, screw the fast edit. Take your time to make something you love.
