3 Tips for Mixing Photo & Video

Most newer DSLRs are now coming fully equipped with a video feature as well. This is so exciting! I have loved exploring how I can incorporate video into how I document our family.

Watch my super short adventure with my boys over this past weekend, that turned into a fun video/photo story:

Learning how to strongly use both forms of media is best understood by looking at their individual strengths:

Still Photography: allows for us to focus on a single moment and expression, thus furthering the impact of that single moment. It’s poetic, in a sense. It allows us to ponder and interpret that moment of our life in many directions. It’s also easy to display in both digital and print formats.

Video: allows us an even deeper sensory experience. We can document audio and visual movement. In documenting terms, this means that we can hear the voices and environmental sounds of our experiences, we can see movement and have a virtual “living and breathing” record of our lives. How cool is that?!

When you marry the two together magic happens as you get the best of both worlds!

Here are 3 Tips for Mixing Photo & Video Together:

1. Look for movement. Video is most powerful when there is something moving, a huge advantage since continuous motion is one thing photography by itself doesn’t give us. Movement can be emphasized in you panning the camera or capturing the movement of those in your frame.

2. Shoot this movement with both video and photo. When mixing the two mediums later, it is really fun to see a still shot that came from the same movement featured on the video. This allows us that “ponder” moment that photography gives us. In my Bike Races video, the boys raced up and down the sidewalk several times having fun. Sometimes I chose to shoot the scene with video and other times I shot the same scene with photography. I’m not doing both at the same time or switching instantaneously. I just have them repeat the movement again focusing on one or the other.

3. Look for a Beginning and an End. This is one of the amazing storytelling tips that I learned from Davina’s Familyness Photo Workshop. Now when I shoot anything that is storytelling, I try to find a beginning and an ending to the story. In the case of this video, the beginning is simply taking the bike out of the garage, and the end is putting it back and locking up the door. Super simple, but it gives a sense of anticipation at the start and closure at the end.