A common mistake shooters make is they don’t know how add depth to a wedding. I know it is tough, when you’re in a situation where you have to think quickly on your feet at a wedding. I am guilty of it! You are preparing for the toasts, but your mind is so set on making sure you capture the moment, you don’t consider the depth.

Depth is what separates the rookies from the pros. It’s how viewers can quickly tell a cinematographer from a videographer.

Once again, I’m not saying a videographer is not needed on a wedding day. It all depends on the couple.

When you think about depth, you should think about dimensions. Are you going to have a flat image or show a clear distinction between the foreground, middle ground, and background? A lot of shooters get depth of field and dimensions confused. I remember when I first started shooting, I wanted everything to be DOF’d(Depth of Field). It was the coolest effect on earth. I felt like I was doing cinematography with this trick, but I realized there is a time and place to use DOF. Dimensions can always be used to tell a story. For example, it could be used by showing the speech from the crowd point of view by placing a camera behind a group of people and making sure the person giving the speech is in focus. That is dimensions! That is adding depth to a wedding! The backs of the guest’s heads are the foreground, the speech giver is the middle ground, and the background is anything or anybody behind him or her. That makes the viewer have something that is visual pleasing to the eye verses and straight on shot of the person giving the speech. Which example sounded like I was excited describing it? lol

Sometimes you have to create your depth. Here’s the thing, there is no clear cut way to do depth. It is all about your creativity! Train your mind, train your eye, watch movies, and be creative. Those are the keys…..but of course that is just my opinion.

(All photos were pulled from our raw footage of films)

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