How to EASILY color grade Sony A7Sii, FS5, and a6300 footage using Premiere Pro CC

How to EASILY color grade Sony A7Sii, FS5, and a6300 footage using Premiere Pro CC

Color grading has always been one of my favorite facets of cinematography. Think about the warm reds and oranges of Mad Max, or the darker hues of The Revenant. The ability of a colorist to alter the mood and feel of a film through hues and saturation is incredibly powerful. I’ve been wanting to make a color grading tutorial for years, but it wasn’t until about a year ago that I felt like I had learned enough to even consider doing it. I knew the time was right when I finished creating my video about my favorite picture profile for the A7Sii.

This is a modified version of my color grading workflow, and here’s why. Normally when I color grade I use Magic Bullet Looks from Red Giant, but I didn’t feel like making you spend 400 bucks on a program whenever you can do basically the same thing inside Adobe Premiere Pro CC. So everything in this tutorial happens in Premiere, using nothing but the Lumetri Color panel that’s already sitting there.

And that does not mean this only applies to wedding films shot with the A7Sii, or any other camera for that matter. The philosophy, the curves, and the color wheels should apply to any video you are color grading, regardless of its content. If you can understand curves and color wheels you can grade anything, in any software, so those two things are what we’re going to spend most of our time on.

You will need a copy of Premiere Pro CC to follow along. Adobe offers a free trial of Creative Cloud with all their apps, including Premiere Pro, and you can download the trial here.

Before You Start: Calibrate Your Monitor

I hope and pray that you are doing your color grading on a color calibrated monitor. Now, you can go out and spend thousands of dollars on some fancy 10-bit monitor that’s made for color grading, but I haven’t even done that. If you’re poor like me, all I use for color grading is a basic Dell monitor that I bought a Spyder color calibration tool for.

The reason I’m recommending this is that if you do not calibrate your monitor, you have no way of knowing whether your colors are correct. Even if you bought some brand new iMac and it looks beautiful, the colors still might not be accurate. Your eyes will lie to you, too. Before I calibrated my monitor I thought it looked fine, and then I did it and I was like, that looks completely different, did I really think that looked good?

Another thing to consider is that most monitor manufacturers skew their colors to a cooler blue tint, because they know the monitor is most likely going to get used in a workplace with harsh fluorescent lighting while you type away in your cubicle on your Excel spreadsheets. That blue tint is not something you want translating over into your color grade. Calibration brings you back to a neutral look that will hold up across most screens.

So please, please calibrate at some point, because if you’re delivering a video to a client who paid for it, you want it to look as good as possible. That’s the whole reason we’re color grading. I just don’t want you ending up with a grade that looks beautiful on your monitor and terrible on everything else, where you’re telling the client no, no, come to my house, watch it on my monitor, it looks great here, don’t ever watch it any other way. You don’t have to do that.

The face that I make when my monitor isn't calibrated properly...
The face that I make when my monitor isn’t calibrated properly…

The other recommendation is to watch my video on my favorite A7Sii picture profile first. Spoiler alert: it’s PP8, with the Cine4 gamma and the S-Gamut3.Cine color space. If you shoot some footage in that profile and then bring it into Premiere, your footage is going to line up almost exactly with the footage I’m working on here, which makes following along a whole lot easier.

Get Philosophical First

Before you touch a single slider, I want you to think about what mood you want to express in your film, because color grading is all about setting a mood. And that can vary completely depending on your couple. Are they bright and happy? Are they in a country setting? Are they getting married on top of a skyscraper? All of those locations and moods and emotions can dictate where you go with your grade.

I also want you to think about the look you want your work to represent. Ideally, someday in the future, someone will be watching one of my videos and go, hey, that looks like one of Matt Johnson’s videos, I recognize that grade. It hasn’t happened yet, but you know, I can hope and dream.

We already do that with other people. Think about the first season of Daredevil, which has this yellow and purple look that’s so unique you can watch it and immediately say, that’s Daredevil. Or for a more extreme example, think about Michael Bay. All of his movies look the same. Super high contrast, high saturation, skin tones like orange popping out at you. You see it and you say, that’s Michael Bay, that’s a summer blockbuster. I’m not advocating doing exactly that, but having a look that’s recognizable can be incredibly powerful.

I’d also recommend learning about complementary colors, because there’s a whole science of color that goes along with the art of color, and knowing both will make your grading better. We’re going to use complementary colors later in this tutorial without me making a big deal about it.

Premiere Pro CC and Your Hero Shot

This is Premiere Pro CC, and just for clarification, I’m using the 2015.2 release. I’m going to assume you already know how to import footage and create a timeline, because if you don’t, we’ve got a lot more basics to cover first. So we’re going to pretend your film is already edited and you’re ready to grade it.

First, scroll through your edited film until you find your hero shot. The hero shot is the shot you believe most exemplifies your film. Ideally it has a lot of highlights, a lot of shadows, and it really shows off this is what my film looks like, this is what it’s going to be. The shot I picked has a great variety of shadows, highlights, and midtones, and it also exemplifies the wedding. This is Katelyn and Paul. They got married outdoors in December, and it was beautiful weather, because this is Texas and it doesn’t really get wintry here. Thankfully.

Premiere Pro project panel showing 'Color Grading - Finished' and 'Color Grading - Work' sequences, outdoor couple clip in the monitor

Go up to the Color tab, which is one of the best things Adobe ever added to Premiere in my opinion. Select Color and you’ll get the whole Lumetri Color window. It might be in a different spot on yours, but it’s got Basic, Creative, Curves, Color Wheels, and Vignette. The only two we really need to concern ourselves with are Curves and Color Wheels.

Now that I’ve said that, we’re actually not going to start there. Go to Basic Correction first, because before I do any other grading I like to boost the saturation a little bit. This is a pretty flat image, so I’m going to bring saturation up to about 130. It doesn’t have to be precise. It’s just so I can understand the colors I’m working with and get a good idea of where I want to take the grade.

And here’s where the philosophy comes back. Katelyn and Paul are good friends of mine. They’re in my Bible study group, we hang out pretty often, and they are some of the most fun, happy-go-lucky people I know. Whenever I think about them I think bright colors, good saturation, warm and inviting. Even though it’s December, which you’d think means cold, this is Texas, so it’s a beautiful blue sunny day. For their wedding film I want them to look back and say, man, that was a happy and fun day, and I want the grade to push that further. I don’t want just the editing to say that was fun. I want them to watch the grade and feel it.

Curves: Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights

Once your saturation is up a little so you can tell what you’re working with, go straight into Curves. This may look confusing, but it really isn’t, and I’ll make it as simple as I possibly can.

Lumetri Color RGB Curves panel with an unadjusted flat diagonal line, the bride and groom with foreheads together under trees

Start at the top. You have White, Red, Green, Blue. You may have heard of RGB before, because red, green, and blue are the basis for all other colors. White is considered all colors, which is why it’s selected by default, and that’s what we want, because we want to affect the curve for every color at once.

So what is the curve? The curve is the brightness and contrast of your image, and it’s broken up into three segments: shadows, midtones, and highlights. If you remember one thing from this whole tutorial, remember that. Bottom left of the line is shadows, the middle is midtones, and the top of the line is highlights.

Click once on the line and it makes a little data point, then drag up and down with your mouse. Drag up on the bottom left and you bring your shadow level up. Drag down and you bring it down. At this point I want to crush the shadows just a little bit. And that’s one of the first things you learn about color grading: it’s a subtle art. You don’t want to go crazy. Start adjusting a ton and you end up with this digital black look that just looks awkward, or a crazy blown out look. Subtlety is key.

Something else that’s worth knowing here. The longer you look at an image, the more used to it you get. So if you’re ever sitting there going, man, I don’t know if this looks good or not, take a step away. Literally go spend five minutes doing something else, then come back and you’ll be able to say oh, that does look good, or it doesn’t. From what I’ve researched, you really only have about five to ten seconds to look at an image before it starts getting baked into your mind. Get a second opinion from someone else if you can.

Next, click in the middle and make another data point, and start adjusting the midtones. Midtones are usually where the majority of your skin tones live, so pay very special attention here, because this is what determines how people look in your image. You don’t want alien green people, or skin tones that are too dark and washed out, or so bright that everyone is glowing. You want something subtle and right in the middle that resembles film. I bring the middle up just a little and the skin tones start looking pretty good.

Lastly you’ve got your highlights. In this shot they were starting to look a little digital and baked, because the sun was so bright on the side of the frame, and that’s distracting. So click and create a third data point up top and drag those down a little. They go from digital-looking pop to something much more subtle, where the grass is still a little bright but it isn’t pulling your eye away from the couple anymore.

RGB Curves panel now showing an S-curve applied for contrast, same forehead-to-forehead shot of the bride and groom

Color Wheels: Start With The Midtones

Now that you’ve adjusted the shadows, midtones, and highlights of your curves, it’s time to go to the color wheels. Same three segments, but this time you’re adjusting the color of each one instead of the brightness. Adjust the shadow wheel and it brings that color into the shadows, midtone wheel into the midtones, highlight wheel into the highlights.

Always start with the midtones. Click in the center, grab the little plus, and the color wheel appears. In this case, because I want brighter, happier, warmer, I’m going to start dragging up into the warm side, and immediately that affects the skin tones. They go from washed out to a more saturated, warm color.

Color Wheels panel expanded showing Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights, over the bouquet embrace clip, Matt talking calmly in the webcam corner

You don’t want to go too extreme here. It’s so easy to just drag it up and think looks good, but it doesn’t, it looks way too red and weird. Bring it back down. Be careful, too, because if you drag too far to the left you start getting green, and too far to the right you start getting purple. You want to land right in between those two.

Are you seeing the benefit of a calibrated monitor right about now? If you didn’t have one, you wouldn’t be able to say ah, that looks good. It’d be more like, yeah, I hope.

Shadows: Where It’s Easiest To Ruin Everything

Next up are the shadows, and you want to be really careful here, because it’s really easy to wreck your image fast. If I start adding blue to the shadows, immediately it puts a total tint over everything and it looks weird. Add some green and suddenly we’ve got Alien Ville. Add red and it looks like some sort of insane murder plot, which is probably not the mood you’re going for at a wedding.

Same Color Wheels panel over the bouquet embrace clip, Matt mid-sentence with his mouth open wide in the webcam corner

This is where complementary colors come in. A complementary color is one on the opposite side of the color wheel from the color you’re already using. So if you have warmer skin tones, maybe you want cooler shadows to make the skin tones pop out of the image. That’s exactly what we do here. Drag the shadow wheel down toward blue, just a hair, and the skin tones pop. Go too far right and you get red, too far left and you get green. It’s a very, very fine line, and a little goes a long way.

Then the highlights. Half the time I don’t even adjust the highlights, because messing with them can make very weird things happen to your skin tones and to the brightness of your image, very quickly. Usually I leave them alone, because I’ve already white balanced for the light source in the room and I know that color is good. In this shot, though, I wanted the sunlight coming in from the left to be a little warmer and more vibrant, so I pushed the highlight wheel mostly into the red, because I didn’t want that green reflection coming in.

And here’s your finished grade. Without, with. Without, with. I’d say that’s a pretty big change, but I think it looks good. One last thing I might do is bring the saturation up to about 140 to add a little extra pop without being overdone.

Basic Correction panel expanded with White Balance and Tone sliders, program monitor showing the couple's outdoor embrace near the tree line

Render it out and look at it. The highlights have a nice roll off, the shadows are well exposed, the skin tones are warm. That’s a good hero shot, because I’d definitely use this shot in the video and it’s a good indicator of how the rest of the film is going to look.

Copying The Grade To Your Other Clips

Now we need to talk about applying the grade from your hero shot to everything else. Go up to the Lumetri Color effect and hit Ctrl+C, or right click and copy, or Command+C on a Mac. Then go to the next clip you want to grade and paste.

In this case I have a close-up from the same scene, and pasting the look onto it gets me most of the way there right off the bat. It just needs a couple of tweaks. Back to curves, drop the shadows a little more to crush the blacks just a hair. Over to the color wheels, and the skin tones feel a little too red, so bring the midtones down slightly. Then adjust the highlights and see how it sits. That’s your hero shot look copied over to the second clip, and I’d say it looks pretty darn good.

RGB Curves S-curve panel, program monitor showing the bride laughing with her forehead against the groom's in warm sunlight

A Shot That’s Completely Different

Next let’s take that hero grade and drop it on a shot that has nothing in common with it. This is Paul getting ready, and we’re in a library and study room at the venue. Lots of dark wood, and two sources of sunlight coming in through two windows, key from the left and fill from the right.

Copy the Lumetri effect, paste it onto the clip, and as you can see, it’s a little warm. So let’s tweak it down to match everything else. Go to the color wheels first, bring the midtones down until his skin tones stop looking crazy, and that’s already a whole lot better. I like the warmth coming in from the highlights, and the shadows want a little more blue.

RGB Curves S-curve panel, program monitor showing the groom pumping his fist indoors with string lights blurred behind him

Then play with the curves. You can see how much room we have in the shadows here, so I bring those up a little, because I do like the bookshelf and I don’t want it going completely black. For the midtones I’m watching the overexposure to make sure I’m not losing any detail in his shirt, so I bring that down just a hair. And for the highlights, bring them up a little to make things pop.

Paul is looking pretty darn dapper at this point. He looks a little agonized in this scene, but he’s checking himself out in the mirror and he’s really proud of how he looks. Don’t be fooled by that face. He is incredibly excited about it.

Grading Under Artificial Light

The last one I want to show you is different from all the others, because everything up to now has been a sunlit scene with natural light. Now we’re at the reception, and unless I took them out under the moonlight, which I probably could feasibly do with the A7Sii, we are stuck with artificial lighting. We’ve got string lights hanging from the ceiling and the spotlight I bring along to every wedding to properly light the dance floor. All of it is roughly 3200K, which is a completely different world from daylight.

Copy the hero shot grade over to this clip and everything goes mighty orange, because that grade was built for the sun. So we tweak.

Color Wheels panel open, program monitor showing a nighttime reception dance floor with the bride and a partner holding hands under string lights

Open up the curves first. Bring the shadows down a little, leave the midtones about where they are, and be careful with the highlights, maybe lowering them slightly. Then the color wheels, which is where the majority of the change happens on a shot like this. Start with the highlights, and you’ll notice that as you adjust them, most of the change is happening on my light, because that’s the main highlight source in the image. Bring it back down toward a neutral white. Then the midtones come back down a couple of notches, but not too far, because you’ll lose the warmth in the skin. And for the shadows, leaving them up gives you a warmish, almost greenish tint that you don’t want, so bring a little more blue in.

At this point everything I’m doing is starting to look the same to me, which is the signal to step back, relax a little, and come back to it. But I think that looks pretty good. Still warm and fun, under a completely different lighting scenario.

Watch The Whole Thing Back

Play all your clips together and pay attention to how the grade matches up between them. This is one of the most crucial last steps of any color grade: watching your entire video all the way through. Whenever you do, you’ll notice things. Maybe the second clip could have used a hint more warmth in the skin tones. Maybe the last one needed a few more adjustments. But overall it holds together, and that’s the goal.

Finished color-graded frame of the bride and groom smiling among trees in warm golden-hour light, no editing interface visible

And that’s it. You just learned how to color grade your first wedding video. Granted, that’s just the basics, and we have only barely scratched the surface here.

Where To Learn More

If you want to keep going, there are two resources I recommend without hesitation. The first is the Tao Colorist Newsletter, sent out weekly by Patrick Inhofer. He goes into detail about the latest color grading technology, philosophy, tips, and tools, and it’s a genuinely great educational resource. I sit down every Sunday afternoon and read it. Patrick also runs the Tao of Color website, which has tutorials and even a full course that covers grading an entire feature film, where you sit down and grade your way through the movie and he gives you feedback at every step. That one is really awesome if you want to learn a ton.

The second is Color Grading Central by Denver Riddle. The guy is kind of a legend in the color grading community. He has a ton of free tutorials on his YouTube channel, and he makes plugins and LUTs you can buy and use on your own footage. Now if he would only make some plugins for Premiere Pro. 🙂

The Next Step: Grading With LUTs

At the end of this video I promised a follow-up all about lookup tables, or LUTs, and how you can use them when grading your footage. That video exists now, and it walks through a lot of the same ground as this one, except you apply a LUT at the start and then tweak from there to get a great looking image. You can watch it here: How to use LUTs to color grade A7Sii, FS5, and a6300 footage in Premiere Pro CC.

Years after this tutorial I ended up making my own set of LUTs, and I also remade this whole workflow for the newer Sony cameras and picture profiles. If you’re shooting on something more recent than an A7Sii, those are the ones you want:

Want To Watch More?

If you have any questions or comments about color grading or anything else relating to wedding cinematography, please get in touch. You can also see my wedding films at Filmstrong Productions, and follow along on Instagram.

A note on timing: this tutorial was filmed in March 2016 using the 2015.2 release of Premiere Pro CC. The Lumetri panel has picked up a lot of features since then, and the panel layout has moved around, but curves and color wheels work exactly the same way they did here, and so does the philosophy.

My Favorite Picture Profile For the Sony A7Sii and FS5

My Favorite Picture Profile For the Sony A7Sii and FS5

Three months ago, I started making wedding cinematography training videos to help others film weddings. It took about a week after uploading my first video for me to discover that there is a massive community of wedding cinematographers out there that want to get better at their craft. As I produce more videos in this series, I find that I am asked even more questions in comments and emails. These messages are added to an ever-increasing list of videos that I will be making in the future.

By far though, the most popular question I have received is, “Which picture profile should I use when shooting with my A7Sii?” This is definitely a complicated question due to the sheer depth of the picture profile menu on the A7Sii and FS5, as well as how many differing opinions there are across the many blogs and forums across the Internet. Your train of thought may have been something like mine: “Do I shoot with the new fancy SLOG3? But doesn’t that cause noise in the shadows? What about SLOG2 instead? Isn’t that going to cause an odd green tint in some images? Maybe one of the Cinegammas then? Aren’t those called Hypergammas in the higher end Sony Cameras? Why is everything so different? Am I crazy? Does this even look better?”

The look I make when I think too hard about Sony's picture profiles.
The look I make when I think too hard about Sony’s picture profiles.

I’m excited to say that today I have an answer for you. After extensive testing, and reading throughout the vast corners of the Internet so you don’t have to, I have found an ideal picture profile. Please keep in mind that while this may be my favorite picture profile, it doesn’t have to be yours. You can have a different opinion from me, and that is alright.

I wanted a picture profile that would suit my needs well. It needed wide dynamic range, a flat image for color grading (but not too flat!), and be versatile for the wide variety of shooting locations I typically go through on a wedding day.

Those needs almost immediately cut SLOG2 and SLOG3, with their minimum ISOs of 1600, and their bright exposure requirements, from my list of options for picture profiles. Incidentally, the 8-bit codec of the A7Sii in SLOG3 can also cause banding in the finer color gradients like blue skies etc. I wanted to avoid this as well.

If you don’t feel like watching me ramble in the above video for 6 minutes about picture profiles, here are the settings for my favorite picture profile:

SETTINGS FOR MY FAVORITE PICTURE PROFILE FOR THE SONY A7Sii and FS5

-Reset PP8 to default.
-Change the Gamut from SLOG3 to CINE4.

That’s it! Congratulations, you’re now shooting in my favorite picture profile! Leave all the other settings as they are. Go try it out and see how you like it. I’ll be making another video soon, showing how I color grade this picture profile.

Special thanks for Marien Breithouwer for originally sharing this picture profile.

Want to watch more? Check out my reviews of the A7Sii and FS5, as well as a tip for how wedding cinematographers and photographers can get along. If you have any questions or comments about this picture profile or anything else relating to wedding cinematography, please get in touch.

How wedding cinematographers can get along with photographers (and vice versa)!

How wedding cinematographers can get along with photographers (and vice versa)!

If you’ve watched my previous two wedding cinematography vlogs, you’re probably aware that they’re on the technical side. I’ve covered bit rates, color depth, picture profiles, and battery life for both the Sony A7Sii and the FS5. Both are amazing cameras that I was more than happy to review and share with other wedding cinematographers, and if you’re looking to switch or upgrade, I’d highly recommend watching both of those.

But I’ve got to take a step back from technical reviews like that, mostly because I cannot afford to buy any more cameras at this point.

Video title card reading How Wedding Cinematographers Can Get Along With Wedding Photographers over a talking-head shot

So instead I want to talk about something that, in my opinion, has a far greater effect on how you create great wedding films than any camera does. Wedding days at their core are about relationships. The bride and groom’s relationship. The parents and their relationship with their children. The minister’s relationship with the couple. And a whole lot more as these two families come together on the wedding day.

Let’s talk about one more relationship, one that will affect you more than any of the others on the wedding day. Your relationship with the photographer. Or, if you’re the photographer reading this, your relationship with the videographer, because this works exactly the same in both directions.

Clearly, my beard and I are excited to share this tip with you.
Clearly, my beard and I are excited to share this tip with you.

You Get A New Coworker Every Single Week

Have you ever had a wedding where everything just clicks? You meet the photographer, you start getting along, you realize you have the same interests, and suddenly you go from who is this random person to hey, there’s a cool shot over here, you should check this out. And you’re both like, that’s awesome. And by the end of the night you’re swapping information, saying we should hang out sometime, oh you’re in town too, this is great, oh you’re two hours away, I’ll drive to see you, this is awesome. Because meeting other creative people like that can be such a cool experience.

What if I told you every single wedding could be like that? Maybe not to the point where you’re making weekend plans at the end of every one, but where you leave saying that was a positive experience, I liked working with that person, I would do that again. That’s my whole goal with this video.

One huge thing to consider is that a wedding is not a normal job. And I know, dumb Matt, of course it isn’t. But think about what that actually means. You are not in a cubicle from nine to five, Monday through Friday. If you work in a cubicle, of course you know the same people, because you see them every day. With a wedding, you are working with a different coworker every single week. One week it’s one photographer, the next week it’s a completely different one.

Bearded man in profile with mouth open and eyebrows raised, mid-word looking off to the side

Some of those people are great. They’re entrepreneurial, they should not be in a cubicle, they should be doing their own thing and running their own business and being happy and successful. On the flip side, you also get people who are way too crazy to work in a cubicle, who are a little bit insane, who would genuinely not get along well with others, and their solution was I’m going to start my own business so I don’t have to work with those people. Except now you have to work with them, because you’re both shooting the same wedding. And if you’re one of those people, I’m sorry, I’m sure you’re a very nice person, but you’re a little weird. Okay. Just saying.

Regardless of who you’re working with, remember that the bride and groom chose them. It’s not up to your opinion. You don’t get to show up and decide this person is insane and I don’t want to work with them. It is your job to get along with them for the day. So if you can hold onto one thing, hold onto this: the bride chose them, she wants to be happy, let’s keep her happy, let’s get along. That goes a long, long way. It’s not about you. It’s about the bride and groom.

The Tip That Blew My Mind

This is my first massive tip for you, and it blew my mind whenever I experienced it. I want to give a huge thanks to Alex Maldonado at Alex M Photography for doing it to me first, so that I could experience it and then share it with you.

Bearded man in profile looking off to the side with a calm, closed-mouth expression while talking

Here it is, step by step.

  1. Find out who the photographer is before the wedding. Whenever you talk to the bride and groom beforehand, and you should be talking to them beforehand, ask who they hired. Then go look up their work. Go to their website, look at their portfolio, look things over, and find something positive in it.
  2. Go to their contact page and send them an email saying hi. That’s it. That’s the whole thing that blew my mind. Alex emailed me out of nowhere and said, hey man, your work’s cool, good to be working with you this Saturday. And I was like, who are you? You’re so friendly, this is crazy. I went from I don’t know who I’m working with to oh, I’m working with Alex, this is awesome. We went instantly from you’re my wedding competition for the day to you’re my friend Alex, this is great.
  3. Tell them something you like about their work. Tell them you’re a fan of something. And if you’re looking at their photography thinking well, I’m not a huge fan of that, find the positives anyway. Hey, those are cute kids you’re taking pictures of. I really like your use of black and white. Find something you can genuinely compliment, because that starts things off on the right foot. And remember, the bride and groom chose them. They clearly saw something positive that they wanted. That’s why they hired them.
  4. Tell them you’re looking forward to shooting with them. This one will amaze them. They’ll be sitting there going, me? They’re looking forward to shooting with me? And suddenly you’ve built this whole rapport. You reached out, you said hello, you complimented their work, and you told them you’re looking forward to working with them. You’ve gone from who is this stranger I have to spend all weekend with to you’re Matt, you’re awesome, I love working with you.
  5. End your message with your phone number. Tell them to call or text if they have any questions. If you extend that professional courtesy ahead of time, you will be amazed at how smoothly your wedding day goes.
Bearded man mid-sentence with one hand raised palm-up beside a string-light branch decoration

When You Actually Meet On The Wedding Day

Fast forward to the wedding. You’ve reached out, you’ve sent the email, you’ve gotten a nice reply back. Whenever you meet the photographer for the first time in person, reiterate everything you said in that email.

First, tell them you want to get along. I realize that sounds basic, essentially I want to be your friend, but it really is helpful to say it out loud. Second, tell them you want to share ideas. So if you see a cool shot, tell them. Hey, this is a cool angle, come over here and check this out. And suddenly you’ve got creative information flowing back and forth, instead of this is my shot, my perfect precious shot, and you don’t get it. You end up with a genuine collaboration where both of your work improves because of it.

Bearded man reacting with wide eyes and raised eyebrows while holding a white phone in both hands

If you put all of this into practice, you’ll show up on the wedding day looking like you already know the photographer. I have literally had brides and grooms walk up and ask how many weddings have you two shot together, and I say, one, yours, we met ten minutes ago. And they say, but you get along. And you go, is that weird? Okay. But that’s what happens when you hit it off with each other.

I’ve had photographers absolutely floored just because I emailed them. Within five minutes of shooting they’re saying I want you to shoot every wedding with me, and I’m getting referrals from them now, because they enjoyed working with me. All because I took two minutes out of my day to send an email that said hi, I like your work, looking forward to this weekend.

Special thanks to Upper Torso Alex for his assistance with this VLOG.
Special thanks to head and shoulders Alex for his assistance with this vlog.

Everybody Wins

Above all, keep in mind that everybody wins whenever the photographer and the cinematographer get along. You’re less stressed. The bride is less stressed. There’s a free flow of creative ideas, both of your portfolios get visuals that look better, and the couple gets a better film and better photos. Everything benefits when the two of you are friendly with each other. It’s a win all around.

Bearded man in a gray shirt talking to camera with a neutral expression, string lights on a branch behind him

I really hope this helps you out, whether you’re a wedding cinematographer or a photographer, and that you can use it to improve your next wedding day.

Want To Watch More?

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to get in touch. You can also watch my wedding films at Filmstrong Productions, and follow along on Instagram.

A note on timing: this was filmed in January 2016, about six years into shooting weddings. The advice hasn’t aged a day, but the cameras in the first paragraph certainly have.