“Hi Sky, I was wondering how you ended up going from being a wedding videographer, to a photographer who does weddings and portraits? Was it hard to transition?” – Curious Video Guy

Something I have been asked by both my brides and grooms, as well as other creative folks over the years, is how I went from wedding videography which I began in 2007, to wedding photography in 2009. It’s actually a very interesting story.

After I resigned from my day job, which if you havn’t read about, you can read here in the post “How I Became a Photographer + Videographer”
So after I left my day job, I had the time to do all sorts of extra things that I didn’t have time to do before, like meet with wedding celebrants, and makeup artists, and have coffee with them so that they knew who I was, and I knew who they were.
I was contacted by a wedding photographer on a wedding forum, who wanted to give me some advice about my marketing. It turned out that the wedding industry regularly had some real ‘chumps’ appearing on the scene.. People who would show up and fly in out of nowhere, be really gun-ho about shooting, and would disappear from the industry as fast as they appeared!
Well this photographer went on to tell me that he thought that maybe I was one of these people, since all of a sudden out of nowhere, my name was all over the internet as a wedding videographer, but he admitted that he really liked me as a wedding professional after meeting me, and we built a friendship.

It was friendships like these, with other wedding suppliers that changed my life. It was February 2009, when he said to me ‘I really think you’d be great at wedding photograph. Why don’t you buy a camera?’ Well my response was immediately defensive.. After spending almost $5000 each on two Sony video cameras that were fantastic current technology at the time, and having to spend money on tripods and wireless microphones, the last thing I wanted to do was spend more money. Especially when I had just walked away from my secure day job two months prior.
This friend of mine had been a videographer for nine years, and had in recent years been combining photography with video, and was thinking about abandoning wedding videography all together.

One problem that I was really coming up against in wedding videography, was a lack of marketing material in terms of pictures for my promotional handouts or business cards. The still shots from weddings are never anywhere near the quality of a high resolution photograph, and I didn’t like the idea of using other photographers images, even though other photographers had offered.
So I bit the bullet, and I went out and bought my Canon 50d and 24-70 f2.8 lens. Those two items cost me almost $4,000 and so with my free time I spent every minute I could taking photographs.

I remember finding it really confusing because while some of the theory of photography and video is the same, they tend to use different names. ISO is ‘Gain’, and Aperture is ‘Iris’ but ‘Shutter Speed’ was the same for both!

I did a lot of stylized shoots, so I’ll write about them in another blog post, but one advantage that I had under my belt was that I was already established and had a great reputation in the local wedding industry. So every videography wedding I would go to shoot, I would ask the photographer “I’m building up a photography portfolio, would you mind if I take a few images?”
Every single one of the photographers was completely fine with me taking photographs, as long as I posed the bride and groom, and didn’t ‘steal their poses’.

I had another challenge though. As I was building my portfolio of images from real weddings, and styled shoots, I was still known by everybody as a wedding videographer, and all the brides that were calling me already had their photographers, and were looking for video. For this reason, it probably wasn’t until early 2010 that my photography bookings were really flowing in.

These days I am better known as a photographer, for the simple fact that once word started getting out, the photography brides started flocking in, and for some reason people always seem to book their wedding photographer between one and two years in advance, whereas videography seems to get booked a little bit later, but I found a way to do combination shoots as well.

It was funny, because I remember my first paid photography wedding, my friend came along with me to second shoot as backup. I remember asking the horse and carriage driver that the bride had hired to walk in a big circle, and then I was taking photos. My friend said ‘You know this isn’t video, you don’t actually need the horse and carriage to move!’ I felt so embarrassed but we had a laugh! Being my first photography gig, I also almost forgot about the family photos! When you’re the videographer, that’s all organized by the photographer, and my friend said ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’

So there you go.. That about sums up my transition from wedding videographer, to wedding photographer, although I still shoot both!

xoxo Sky Simone