The best film-making advice I ever got

[kye]

I've learned a lot about film-making over the years, most of it came through discovery and experimentation, but the best film-making advice I ever got was this...  

See how much contrast and saturation you can add to your images

This probably sounds ridiculous to you, and I can understand why it would, but hear me out.  Not only is it deceptively simple, but it's hugely powerful, and will push you to develop lots of really important skills.

The advice came from a professional colourist on some colour grading forums after I'd asked about colour grading, and as I make happy holiday travel videos it seemed to be a logical but completely obvious piece of advice, but it stuck with me over the years.  The reason I say "over the years" is that the statement is deceptively simple and took me on a journey over many many years.  When I first tried it I failed miserably.  It's harder than it looks...  a lot harder.

The first thing it taught me was that I didn't know WTF I was doing with colour grading, and especially, colour management.

Here's a fun experiment - take a clip you've shot that looks awful and make it B&W.  It will get better.  Depending on how badly it was shot, potentially a lot better.

It took me years to work out colour management and how to deal with the cameras I have that aren't supported by any colour management profiles and where I had to do things myself.  I'm still on a learning curve with this, but I finally feel like I'm able to add as much contrast and saturation as I like without the images making me want to kill myself.  I recently learned how the colour profiles work within colour management pipelines and was surprised at how rudimentary they are - I'm now working on building my own.

The second thing it taught me was that all cameras are shit when you don't absolutely nail their sweet-spot, and sometimes that sweet-spot isn't large enough to go outside under virtually any conditions, and that sometimes that sweet spot doesn't actually exist in the real-world.

Here's another fun and scarily familiar experiment - take a shot from any camera and make it B&W.  It makes it way better doesn't it?  Actually, sometimes it's astonishing.  Here's a shot from one of the worst cameras I have ever used:

We're really only now just starting to get sub-$1000 cameras where you don't have to be super-gentle in pushing the image around without risking it turning to poop.  (Well, with a few notable exceptions anyway...  *cough* OG BMPCC *cough*).  Did you know that cinematographers do latitude tests of cinema cameras when they're released so they know how to expose it to get the best results?  These are cameras with the most amount of latitude available, frequently giving half-a-dozen stops of highlights and shadows, and they do tests to work out if they should bump up or push down the exposure by half a stop or more, because it matters.

Increasing the contrast and saturation shows all the problems with the compression artefacts, bit-depth, ISO noise, NR and sharpening, etc etc.  Really cranking these up is ruthless on all but the best cameras that money can buy.

Sure, these things are obvious and not newsworthy, but now the fun begins....

The third thing it taught me was to actually see images - not just looking at them but really seeing them.

I could look at an image from a movie or TV show and see that it looked good (or great), and I could definitely see that my images were a long way from either of those things, but I couldn't see why.  The act of adding contrast and saturation, to the point of breaking my images, forced me to pay attention to what was wrong and why it looked wrong.  Then I'd look at professional images and look at what they had.  Every so often you realise your images have THAT awful thing and the pro ones don't, and even less often you realise what they have instead.

I still feel like I'm at the beginning of my journey, but one thing I've noticed is that I'm seeing more in the images I look at.  I used to see only a few "orange and teal" looks (IIRC they were "blue-ish" "cyan-ish" and "green-ish" shadows) and now I see dozens or hundreds of variations.  I'm starting to contemplate why a film might have different hues from shot-to-shot, and I know enough to know that they could have matched them if they wanted to, so there's a deeper reason.

I'm noticing things in real-life too.  I am regularly surprised now by noticing what hues are present in the part of a sunset where the sky fades from magenta-orange to yellow and through an assortment of aqua-greens before getting to the blue shades.

The fourth thing it taught me was what high-end images actually look like.

This is something that I have spoken about before on these forums.  People make a video and talk about what is cinematic and my impression is completely and utter bewilderment - the images look NOTHING like the images that are actually shown in cinemas.  I wonder how people can watch the same stuff I'm watching and yet be so utterly blind.

The fifth thing it taught me was how to actually shoot.

Considering that all cameras have a very narrow sweet spot, you can't just wave the damned thing around and expect to fix it in post, you need to know what the subject of the shot is.  You need to know where to put them in the frame, where to put them in the dynamic range of the camera, how to move the camera, etc.  If you decide that you're going to film a violinist in a low-bitrate 8-bit codec with a flat log profile, and then expose for the sky behind them even though they're standing in shadow, and expect to be able to adjust for the fact they're lit by a 2-storey building with a bright-yellow facade, well... you're going to have a bad time.  Hypothetically, of course.  Cough cough.

The sixth thing it taught me is what knobs and buttons to push to get the results I want.

Good luck getting a good looking image if you don't know specifically why some images look good and others don't.  Even then, this still takes a long time to gradually build up a working knowledge of what the various techniques look like across a variety of situations.  I'm at the beginning of this journey.  On the colourist forums every year or so, someone will make a post that describes some combination of tools being used in some colour space that you've never heard of, and the seasoned pros with decades of experience all chime in with thank-you comments and various other reflections on how they would never have thought of doing that.  I spent 3 days analysing a one-sentence post once.  These are the sorts of things that professional colourists have worked out and are often part of their secret-sauce.

Examples.

I recently got organised, and I now have a project that contains a bunch of sample images of my own from various cameras, a bunch of sample images from various TV and movies that I've grabbed over the years, and all the template grades I have developed.  I have a set of nodes for each camera to convert them nicely to Davinci Wide Gamma, then a set of default nodes that I use to grade each image, and then a set of nodes that are applied to the whole project and convert to rec709.

Here's my first attempt at grading those images using the above grades I've developed.  (This contains NO LUTs either)

The creative brief for the grade was to push the contrast and saturation to give a "punchy" look, but without it looking over-the-top.  They're not graded to match, but they are graded to be context-specific, for example the images from Japan are cooler because it was very cold and the images from India were colourful but the pollution gave the sun a yellow/brown-tint, etc.

Would I push real projects this far?  Probably not, but the point is that I can push things this far (which is pretty far) without the images breaking or starting to look worse-for-wear.  This means that I can choose how heavy a look to apply - rather than being limited through lack of ability to get the look I want.

For reference, here are a couple of samples of the sample images I've collected for comparison.

Hollywood / Blockbuster style images:

More natural but still high-end images:

Perhaps the thing that strikes me most is (surprise surprise) the amount of contrast and saturation - it's nothing like the beige haze that passes for "cinematic" on YT these days.  

So, is that the limits of pushing things?  No!

Travel images and perhaps some of the most colourful - appropriate considering the emotions and excitement of adventures in exotic and far-off lands:

I can just imagine the creative brief for the images on the second half of the bottom row...  "Africa is a colourful place - make the images as colourful as the location!".

In closing, I will leave you with this.  I searched YT for "cinematic film" and took a few screen grabs.  Some of these are from the most lush and colourful places on earth, but..... Behold the beige dullness.  I can just imagine the creative brief for this one too: "make me wonder if you even converted it from log...."

 

[PannySVHS]

Great read and recap! Thank you! @kye I feel, like my LX15 is almost everything i need in the image quality department but that is for my personal work of course. Or maybe beyond? I got inspired by this great but slippery camera to shoot personal stuff again. The slippery tiny body forces me to shoot, frame, move and conceptionalize in the moment with care and dedication. The odds of ergonomics become a challenge and by practice actually great. Realizing its advantages, there are many of them, this camera has indeed become my favorite personal camera. It equals my love I had for my old time favorite, the legendary G6.

Image quality is plenty. That 8bit codec in 4k is the same as in the GX85 and punches far above its weight. Grain, texture, color palette are beautiful. I shoot in vivid for gradeabilty in post. I got this advice from reading Harrison Kraft giving advice on his LX. Ooc colours are okay in this profile, in other profiles really gruesome what made me diguise this camera right after purchase. Thanks gosh I was wrong about it.

Another thanks to kye for elaborating on pushing the color in the color profile or at least not berobbing the camera of it, due to the logic that the processing is before codec compression.

So, filming in vivid and taming the peak of highlights down to around 768 in post and the image becomes already much better. Working knee and toe, saturation, coolness and warmth and I am already close to what i like. That is in the classy 8bit 4k, no 10bit in sight or needed, cheek in tongue.:) The HD 50p 25mbps codec on the other hand is pretty gruesome. On a side note, the tiny 10mbps codec for 25p 720p on the GX85 is surpisingly strong, which sounds admittedly silly. But that's what I had to find out on accident when I filmed an important family celebration in 720p glory. Of course I was silently screaming "Shyte, I fxxxked up big time this time!" when I wanted to drool over some of my cinema verité awesomness. 😊 But surprise, it held up pretty good regarding achievable hues and color work. Just another example how good even now super affordable or cheap 8bit 709 cameras have become. A Sony A6000 with the 50mbit codec update is an interesting prospect in that regard and would be the ultimate 1080p S35 8bit 420 somewhat pocketable hybrid cinema camera. Lotta categories of greatest cameras. So every fan finds their altars. 😊

Lens on the LX is beautiful. Such a magnificient rendering in all focus lengths. Btw, as many of you know, in 4k the LX15 has only 2/3 inch sensor estate. Still trumping a G6 in lowlight, despite the m43 sensor of the G6, which is four times the area size. I call the LX my personal 16mm cinema pocket cam. I don't mind the missing S16 and be happy with close enough to 16mm powerhouse.:)

Here is a repost of Harrison Krafts video. Thanks to this guy I started doing personal work again.

 

[fuzzynormal]

Quote

actually see images - not just looking at them but really seeing them.

Another great bit of advice I got in my early days was to go study paintings.  Particularly Vermeer's and Caravaggio's.  

As an idiot that didn't understand what made a nice image work and a bad one fail, just analyzing and deconstructing the craft of painting helped a ton.  Absolutely brand-dead simple ideas like having your subject brighter than the background (contrast) confounded me as a newbie, but once I started seeing the techniques like that in practice I couldn't unsee it, and I got better.

Which is why I'm pretty camera agnostic these days.  There's so many fundamental techniques that need to be in place and exercised to create awesome images.  Grabbing the most expensive camera/lens doesn't accomplish that for you, it only assists.

[kye]

Speaking of what high-end images actually look like, here are some 8K scans of IMAX 5-perf from Oppenheimer.

https://dam.gettyimages.com/universal/oppenheimer

The files with filenames like GF-number seem to be 3K, but the other ones seem to be 8K TIFF files - 133Mb each!

How do they look?  Strong colours, often strong contrast, not sharp....  like cinema.

[John Matthews]

Recently, I've rediscovered Cine V and dialing my WB to 5000K. I've been just leaving it there and, to my eye, my footage has been looking much better. I have to wonder if "-5,-5,-5,-5" was just terrible advice that some have given over the years. To me, dialing things back in post makes more sense than making "test chart" dynamic range and pushing everything up in post, only to produce an image that still looks likes it was pushed in post. I think there might be something to having the lion's share of the image pipeline be figured out before post. Maybe it's just me. I need to do more tests.

I know that for my GH2, as old as it is, the Vivid profile was doing much better for me than any other profile for my live streaming English classes. Most of the other profiles were washed-out and I looked unhealthy or just "blah".

[kye]

4 hours ago, John Matthews said:

Recently, I've rediscovered Cine V and dialing my WB to 5000K. I've been just leaving it there and, to my eye, my footage has been looking much better. I have to wonder if "-5,-5,-5,-5" was just terrible advice that some have given over the years. To me, dialing things back in post makes more sense than making "test chart" dynamic range and pushing everything up in post, only to produce an image that still looks likes it was pushed in post. I think there might be something to having the lion's share of the image pipeline be figured out before post. Maybe it's just me. I need to do more tests.

I know that for my GH2, as old as it is, the Vivid profile was doing much better for me than any other profile for my live streaming English classes. Most of the other profiles were washed-out and I looked unhealthy or just "blah".

As long as you're not clipping anything (DR or saturation) then it's mostly better to push up the contrast and saturation in-camera because then in post you're not pulling the bits apart by adding contrast and sat.  

However, that's an "all-else-being-equal" type of statement because your camera will likely be doing things like saturation compression etc, especially in the profiles like Cine-V.  In the end, the proof is in the pudding, so I suggest just taking some test shots at each of the settings and see what you see and draw conclusions from that.

Perhaps the biggest problem with cameras and talking about them online is that there are so many tradeoffs that it's practically impossible to discuss something and take all of them into account.  That 4K vs 1080p thread from a few years ago really highlighted that for me - decisions like that impact the image all the way through the pipeline and you need to understand the whole lot to really understand what is actually being discussed.  Doing your own tests shortcuts all the variables, but only for your own situation and tastes.

[kye]

4 hours ago, John Matthews said:

Recently, I've rediscovered Cine V and dialing my WB to 5000K. I've been just leaving it there and, to my eye, my footage has been looking much better. I have to wonder if "-5,-5,-5,-5" was just terrible advice that some have given over the years. To me, dialing things back in post makes more sense than making "test chart" dynamic range and pushing everything up in post, only to produce an image that still looks likes it was pushed in post. I think there might be something to having the lion's share of the image pipeline be figured out before post. Maybe it's just me. I need to do more tests.

I know that for my GH2, as old as it is, the Vivid profile was doing much better for me than any other profile for my live streaming English classes. Most of the other profiles were washed-out and I looked unhealthy or just "blah".

I should also have mentioned that there's a school of thought in film-making that you leave your camera at a fixed WB, normally something like 5500K, and so during the day will look slightly blue and evenings will look slightly warm.  The rationale is that this is how we experience reality, and also if you're shooting in a more documentary style, then having the time of day reflected in the images is also a visual queue that adds authenticity, because the WB of every shot is contextually relevant.  

[BTM_Pix]

5 hours ago, John Matthews said:

Recently, I've rediscovered Cine V and dialing my WB to 5000K. I've been just leaving it there and, to my eye, my footage has been looking much better. I have to wonder if "-5,-5,-5,-5" was just terrible advice that some have given over the years

Funny you should mention Cinelike V....

A couple of years ago, I did a test with the Profile Stepper app that I wrote for Lumix cameras to do a bit of analysis on their colour profiles.

The idea was to create a video for each profile that contained every permutation of contrast between -5 to +2 combined with saturation between -5 to +3 to see if there were any hidden gems that might bely the received wisdom of "Cinelike D with everything set to -5".

The original post (and thread about the app) is here 

The overall conclusion was that there weren't any hidden gems in amongst the standard profiles but, perhaps more surprisingly, I also found the Cinelike V versions to be more appealing than the Cinelike D ones.

Likely nothing that couldn't be equalised in post but for an out of camera look (which is what I was after) I definitely preferred it.

The test scene was nothing elaborate but was set up to contain enough sky, white textured wall, primary colour and black elements in a bright daylight to subjectively evaluate colour and contrast.

Each video is annotated with the profile name and Contrast/Saturation levels which update accordingly as the Stepper App changes them every 2 seconds.

It was shot on an FZ2000/2500 as that is what I was targeting with the test but will be applicable in relative terms to all Lumix cameras.

If you are bored enough to want to plough through them, this link contains a zip with the individual videos for each profile.

https://mega.nz/file/06QmwYJb#6R8aADqvKMKgG0jaWtX1e-vdTYco019KHJxl66EduoQ

 

[John Matthews]

19 minutes ago, kye said:

I should also have mentioned that there's a school of thought in film-making that you leave your camera at a fixed WB, normally something like 5500K, and so during the day will look slightly blue and evenings will look slightly warm.  The rationale is that this is how we experience reality, and also if you're shooting in a more documentary style, then having the time of day reflected in the images is also a visual queue that adds authenticity, because the WB of every shot is contextually relevant.  

I actually prefer the predictable look of just leaving it at one temperature. Maybe it's old-school, but AWB makes me grade differently for each shot whereas setting the kelvin, as long as it isn't that extreme, helps with the overall feel. Shoot a night shot inside and we can tell it's night because of the yellow lighting, morning and evening outside are blue; it just makes sense. Do this AWB and you have to make things feel blue, yellow, etc. in post.

28 minutes ago, kye said:

As long as you're not clipping anything (DR or saturation) then it's mostly better to push up the contrast and saturation in-camera because then in post you're not pulling the bits apart by adding contrast and sat.  

However, that's an "all-else-being-equal" type of statement because your camera will likely be doing things like saturation compression etc, especially in the profiles like Cine-V.  In the end, the proof is in the pudding, so I suggest just taking some test shots at each of the settings and see what you see and draw conclusions from that.

Perhaps the biggest problem with cameras and talking about them online is that there are so many tradeoffs that it's practically impossible to discuss something and take all of them into account.  That 4K vs 1080p thread from a few years ago really highlighted that for me - decisions like that impact the image all the way through the pipeline and you need to understand the whole lot to really understand what is actually being discussed.  Doing your own tests shortcuts all the variables, but only for your own situation and tastes.

I've done tests regarding contrast settings in particular. My findings were clear: Panasonic cameras DON'T have more latitude or any benefit from reducing contrast from the default; if anything, it just might screw up.

47 minutes ago, BTM_Pix said:

The idea was to create a video for each profile that contained every permutation of contrast between -5 to +2 combined with saturation between -5 to +3 to see if there were any hidden gems that might bely the received wisdom of "Cinelike D with everything set to -5".

It would seem that so many have said this (including myself, probably), but when looking at the results, this "wisdom" doesn't hold up from what I see. I've heard people say "the compression doesn't have to work as hard", but I haven't seen anything that obvious to come to the conclusion of -5 contrast and saturation.

54 minutes ago, BTM_Pix said:

If you are bored enough to want to plough through them, this link contains a zip with the individual videos for each profile.

That was a very interesting test and it probably confirms what I said above as the ones where the contrast and saturation was low.

I'm almost willing to throw up my arms and say: "the Panasonic engineers probably know better than me"- just leave contrast and saturation at its default if you like the way it looks. Sometimes, we just overthink it.

[MrSMW]

7 hours ago, John Matthews said:

Recently, I've rediscovered Cine V and dialing my WB to 5000K. I've been just leaving it there and, to my eye, my footage has been looking much better. I have to wonder if "-5,-5,-5,-5" was just terrible advice that some have given over the years.

Yep. Every time I have tried internet ‘advice’, my result looked shit. And nothing like I wanted it to look like.

I recently discovered log. No really. Up until last year, Fuji or Lumix profiles all the way because I could get a ‘better’ SOOC image and the look I was after, and more consistently.

But this year I switched to log and now have the SOOC look I am after with a bare minimum of tweaking needed.

A SOOC look of course is a combo of factors: sensor, lens, any filters, exp, WB, LUT, in camera tweaks, etc.

A consistent WB is key for me also and all my cameras are now set up with 3 custom settings:

Log outdoors 5500k 640 iso VND

Log indoors 5000k 4000 iso VND

Flat profile low light 5000k auto iso removed VND

The key factor for me now is workflow and consistency because that allows greater creativity in every other area.

[kye]

40 minutes ago, John Matthews said:

I actually prefer the predictable look of just leaving it at one temperature. Maybe it's old-school, but AWB makes me grade differently for each shot whereas setting the kelvin, as long as it isn't that extreme, helps with the overall feel. Shoot a night shot inside and we can tell it's night because of the yellow lighting, morning and evening outside are blue; it just makes sense. Do this AWB and you have to make things feel blue, yellow, etc. in post.

I use AWB exclusively, as I'm completely crap at remembering to set it when conditions change and it doing the WB is going to be closer to correct than me forgetting to update it.  It does mean you need to WB every shot, and I must admit that it took me many years to work out how to do that properly so that it evenly impacts the whole image rather than just making the shadows/mids/highlights all different colours and ruining the image.  

Now I've managed to work out how to get the colour management setup properly it's all good and things work as you'd expect in post.  As I tend to shoot in situations where the lighting is rubbish with poor quality LEDs (often with differing colour temperatures all mixed together!) I need to adjust WB in most shots anyway, so it's something that would be part of my workflow either way, but there's no right answer and so it's just whatever you prefer and find gives you the best results.

[BTM_Pix]

31 minutes ago, John Matthews said:

Sometimes, we just overthink it.

As someone who went to the extent of writing an app to test every single permutation, I couldn't agree more !

[MrSMW]

17 minutes ago, kye said:

As I tend to shoot in situations where the lighting is rubbish with poor quality LEDs (often with differing colour temperatures all mixed together!)

Sounds like a wedding…

The problem is though that AWB for anything like a ceremony or speeches can be a nightmare waiting to unfold.

Imagine the scene… Camera set on tripod in church to capture a 40/45 minute ceremony and everything is set just how you want it. Except the sun starts dipping in and out of the clouds and even though it’s an indoor ceremony, it might be 2500 iso one minute and 4000+ the next, so the exposure keeps changing as does the WB.

Much better to lock the WB and auto ISO.

But that is just my experience.

Short clips, easier to fix but as someone who used to use AWB, much happier now having consistency and that consistency is achieved from not checking every scene (PITA) but simply by having an indoor WB and an outdoor WB…which is easy to remember because for me, it’s a change from C1 to C2 as I walk through the door!

Massively changed my workflow/requirement to ‘fix’ stuff!

[kye]

10 hours ago, MrSMW said:

Sounds like a wedding…

The problem is though that AWB for anything like a ceremony or speeches can be a nightmare waiting to unfold.

Imagine the scene… Camera set on tripod in church to capture a 40/45 minute ceremony and everything is set just how you want it. Except the sun starts dipping in and out of the clouds and even though it’s an indoor ceremony, it might be 2500 iso one minute and 4000+ the next, so the exposure keeps changing as does the WB.

Much better to lock the WB and auto ISO.

But that is just my experience.

Short clips, easier to fix but as someone who used to use AWB, much happier now having consistency and that consistency is achieved from not checking every scene (PITA) but simply by having an indoor WB and an outdoor WB…which is easy to remember because for me, it’s a change from C1 to C2 as I walk through the door!

Massively changed my workflow/requirement to ‘fix’ stuff!

Absolutely.  I don't shoot long clips, and even if I did, I'm only going to end up pulling <5s sections into the timeline, so that makes a big difference.  The AWB / auto-exposure can always change during a 2-5s shot, sometimes significantly, and I've had to deal with that in post too.  
I was introduced to the whole situation when trying to grade one of the first pieces of video I ever recorded - a single shot of my wife carrying my daughters birthday cake from the kitchen to the dining table, candles lit, with everyone singing.  Turns out that kitchen and dining area had radically different lighting that wasn't visible to the naked eye, and I'd filmed it with my Canon 700D which applied a super-strong colour profile, and the AWB was really slow to react so the first 5s or so of everyone at the dining table was akin to one of the most "creative" picture profiles you might imagine.  I should see if I can find that clip and give it another go.  I think I spent over a dozen hours in Resolve trying to work out WTF was happening!

It's all so situational, and we all shoot/edit/grade in such different ways, it really is an individual thing.

Tying it back to the concept of contrast and saturation and the idea that increasing these is like playing the game on the most difficult setting, shooting in poor lighting and having to deal with these AWB issues in post has also pushed me to really get to the bottom of how to do it properly.  Of course, I didn't have to deliver acceptable results in the meantime, so that's something to take into consideration too 🙂 

[Michael S]

I've shot long enough with small sensor, 8-bit rec709 camera's that I got used to "just try to get the recording as close as possible to what you want the final image to look like". So don't drop saturation and contrast to the bottom during recording, only to pull them up in post. This would only make sense if there is a lot of reserve DR in the highlights, and when you are working on a camera where you have to try these tricks, there never is.

Never use auto WB (or auto exposure) as this may make the colours and exposure shift during the shot which is very hard to correct afterwards. It's easier if they are off with a constant error, that's quite easy to fix as long as you are not too far off.

When using these cameras with limited DR I was quite fanatical with setting the whitebalance manually as these cameras tend to exaggerate differences in colour (and contrast). With mixed lighting, artificial light may seem fiercely red while daylight is fiercely blue at the same time. Now that I've got a camera with good DR (Lumix S5) I just set the WB to cloudy when outdoors and incandescent when indoors. Only when encountering weird artificial light (LED, fluorescent or sodium) I might set a custom white balance. Minor corrections might be required in post but nine out of ten times it looks perfectly natural to me. In daylight, shadows are slightly blue, sides exposed to direct sunlight are slightly yellow, just as it is in real life. Only when all image content is exposed to either shadow or sunlight and the shots are of considerable length I might adjust the WB to the specific light just like how my eyes (or brain actually) would adjust to the colour of the ambient light.

It is not so much direct advice that I got but when doing a course on making videos the most important thing I took from it is that people are more predictable then you might think which is especially useful when doing event videography. People are animals of habit and a lot of things we do are ritualized. This means you can always try to think ahead of what might happen next in the coming 10 seconds/minutes/hours and ask yourself what is the most interesting part about that, and how to best visualize that. The result of this is that you will find yourself more often in the right spot at the right time which is I think the most important quality of an event videographer. I remember once recording a wedding video for a friend (I'm not a professional videographer in any way) who also hired a photographer who was just starting out as a wedding photographer. Well, the photographer was actually just a colleague from work for whom this was a nice opportunity to build a portfolio to get started in the business. But I noticed that it happened several times that the photographer had to sprint to the spot where I was already waiting as he realized he was in the wrong spot for what was about to happen next. Always keep anticipating for what might happen, decide what the interesting aspect of that is, and how to best visualize that. You will not always get it right, but the number of times you get "lucky" will increase.

 

[MrSMW]

47 minutes ago, Michael S said:

People are animals of habit and a lot of things we do are ritualized. This means you can always try to think ahead of what might happen next in the coming 10 seconds/minutes/hours and ask yourself what is the most interesting part about that, and how to best visualize that

This is pretty much how us event shooters work to a T. 

With weddings especially, many folks like to think theirs is different and in some ways they are…but basically they are the same…

Couple get ready separately followed by ceremony followed by congrats, drink and nibbles followed by meal and talking and dancing.

When you have been to 800 of the things over 23 years in 15+ countries in every month and in every weather with many cultures and size ranging from 2 to 400…

People are indeed creatures of habit with little variety in reality!