Videography at All Things Photography

"Video and videography is only going to get bigger!"

That is a quote from me by the way. Back in around 2007. I was right : )

It’s pretty obvious that it is already big but in my opinion, it will only get bigger. I think that many people (photographers) would like to include and use video more. Whether it is in their family media or professional photographic life. The trouble is that it presents a whole new learning curve.

If you've never wanted to learn video but currently run a photography business, weddings in particular, it may be time that you started looking into video. More as a "bolt on" for your toolkit at first.

Looking around, I see many wedding photographers starting to add video to their services. Even if like me at the beginning it is just the occasional clip, it could make their services more appealing to couples.

I actually remember being interested in the moving picture long before I got into photography. I was obsessed with the silent, standard and super 8 family movies that I discovered when I was around 9 years old. I'd spend hours and hours going through them all and one day decided to do some editing.

We had an old splicing machine that looked a lot like one of these splicers on Etsy and I would chop up, edit and glue back a lot of our precious memories. I actually did quite a good job unbeknown to my parents and grandparents (whose film it was).

My first digital video camera

When I moved to Spain back in 1998, I bought my first digital video camera and was hooked by the creative features and functions that were now available. I started to record my time in Spain and have yet to go through all the mini DV tapes and get them onto my hard drive.

Then, in 2007 whilst I was in the height of photographing weddings in Spain, I updated my video camera to the newest HD Handycam. This was the pioneering Sony HDR SR1 which used a new compression format called AVCHD. This would save a lot of hard drive space due to its high compression/minimal quality loss format designed by Sony and Panasonic.

It was about the same time where I put my neck on the line with computers. I opted for a Blu Ray high definition DVD burning laptop to go with this Blu Ray HD camera for my videography. This was the time when the war between Blu Ray and HDV was in full swing. I chose well!

So, how would I use this set up?

In the summer of 2007, I diversified my wedding photography business a little. I started to include video clips and footage of the wedding into my slideshows with particular emphasis on:

In August of that year, I shot a wedding in Italy where Girls Aloud were the main guests/entertainment. I filmed the entire gig in HD as a special "freebie" for the couple. You can see a short clip of this in my blog entry for this amazing wedding here: Wedding in Florence, Tuscany, Italy

I found that the footage and sound bites from various parts of the wedding really add to the whole multimedia experience. I still do this today but it is made a lot easier now that I have video functionality in my DSLR’s. In fact, circa 2014, I started filming videos in full with no stills.

Here is a recent wedding that I filmed:

…and here is a selection of family images and video clips merged into a basic slideshow from when I first started really exploring video many years ago. This was quite effective in its day (mixing stills and video) but oh, how things have changed!

With all that in mind, hover over the "videography" navbar at the top to get started. Perhaps start with our "new to video" page. If you found your way here by mistake, hate everything about video and have no interest in it whatsoever, please continue on to the photo pages.