6 Differences between a videographer and a guest with a camera

1. Multiple Angles

To achieve a high-quaity video, it is essential to have more than one camera angle. Would you want to watch a NFL game with the camera perched stationary at the 50 yard line, swiveling back and forth following the ball? Neither would we. Do you want to see the groom's reaction to the bride walking down the aisle? Do you anticipate your guests' involvement in your introductions at the reception? Do you want to relive the bride and groom reciting their vows with their faces towards the camera? We thought so

2. Experience

Have you been to more than five weddings in your life? How about fifteen? Fifty? Okay, I guarantee you haven't been to a hundred. Any professional wedding vendor has been to hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of weddings during their career. I've worked with DJs who have been in the business for over fifty years, photographers who are prolific, and videographers who work three or more weddings per week. Managing disruptions, expecting the unexpected and proper anticipation of key events come with years of experience. As wedding professionals, we've seen it all. We know the 80-minute Catholic full mass ceremony like the back of our hand, we've filmed the signing of the Ketuvah in the Jewish ceremony more times than we can recall, we've seen the Polish polka, captured the Latin salsa and met all of the local JPs. Each wedding brings a new surprise but we are equipped with years of practice to handle whatever comes at us.

3. Technical Aptitude

Remaining competitive in the rapidly changing field of technology is necessary to making a living. If we're not watching what our contemporaries are doing and learning about the latest equipment, we're falling behind. To supplement our training, we develop new skills as editing becomes more precise and cameras become more advanced. We know how to sync pro lavs with the video captured onto high performance SD and we know how to back up our many hard drives and transfer our streaming footage into the cloud. When problems arise, we learn to deal with them because we have to. A guest doesn't have to. A guest is filming as a courtesy and isn't responsible for what the footage looks like. We've all overcome technical problems in the past and learned from them so that they don't happen again. So there's your insurance policy against technical errors.

4. Storytelling

Your wedding's going to become legendary in your family. Think of how quickly your favorite days have gone by. If you could recapture the feelings you had on the best days of your lives, would you? You can. Your hippocampus, the sector of the brain esponsible for maintaining memories, can be triggered by your senses. The right wedding video mixes the sounds of your voices with the bird's eye view of your actions to remind you of how it really was.

5. Equipment

Wedding guests don't carry around pro audio equipment, jibs, fluid-head tripods, dollys, monopods, gliders, or cinema cameras. And if they did, it wouldn't be discrete. Trust someone who has used each of these and knows how to be covert.

6. Reputation

You can trust an experienced videographer based on the reputation he has built for himself. It's an industry where professionalism, knowledge and consistency matter. The professional isn't going to be distracted at the wedding-they're there with a singular purpose.