If you’re a commercial photographer in 2021 you absolutely need to be shooting motion. If you’re a consumer photographer, I also highly recommend having a full-motion portfolio on your website by the end of the year.

As a wedding photographer, I get asked a lot if I also shoot video, and I don’t. I don’t want to. It’s not my jam, and you really need someone dedicated to shooting video the whole day. I also have zero desire to sift through six, eight, twelve hours of wedding footage to put together some epic wedding videos. Weddings are not passion, I love them, but they’re not my passion, and wedding videos are even further down that list. What I could definitely get behind through are documentary family videos, or boudoir videos, or moving portraits of people. Moving portraits are something I’m planning on doing with both my commercial and consumer work. Shoot them at a higher frame rate, slow them down in post, really capture someone’s personality in a way that a still photograph can’t fully emulate.

As far as my commercial photography goes. I’ve been meaning to shoot and add  more motion to my portfolio for the past two years, but I’ve putting it off and putting it off and making excuses. I didn’t want to relearn how to edit video again. I didn’t want to buy equipment I couldn’t afford, and I didn’t really see the value it would add to my portfolio.

In the past two months, I’ve finally addressed all of those excuses and put them to rest. I’ve been experimenting with video and, as you know, Studio Builder has a new YouTube channel with new the first videos dropping next week.

Why You Need to Start Shooting Video

If you’re a commercial photographer, you are going to lose work if you don’t have a motion portfolio. Maybe you were smart enough to start building your motion portfolio a few years ago. That’s awesome! Almost every repped photographer in Toronto shooting advertising work has a motion portfolio. Not only do they have a motion portfolio on their website and a Vimeo or YouTube account, but they are also moving their motion portfolios to the top of their navigation where it used to sit at the bottom. This is our competition.

Because so much of the work we do is going to end up online, most advertising gigs nowadays have a motion element attached to them. And the longer we don’t have motion in our portfolios, the further and further, we fall behind and will have a harder time catching up to the people who are getting work with even basic motion video work in their portfolios.

If you’re a commercial photographer, you absolutely must start shooting motion and make a plan to have motion be the first portfolio people see on your website. Look at the genres you specialize in, and create motion projects to sprinkle through those portfolios. These will also make excellent posts to share on your blog and your Behance projects.

For consumer photographers and photographers who work with entrepreneurs, having motion in your work is much less of a necessity and much more of a value add. If you do a lot of personal brand photography, being able to offer your clients teaser videos and trailers for their website will increase your value and increase your clients’ brand. If you shoot headshots for business people, you could start to include in your package a moving portrait that’s 10 seconds that they can add to their profiles. Facebook allows people to upload videos for a Page’s profile image and banner. 

If you shoot headshots for actors, you probably know that every actor now needs to have a reel, especially since auditions are mostly being done via self-tape now. You could start offering editing services for their reels now, and even providing them with the opportunity to build their first reel with you as DP and editor, provided you have the skills to put together a professional reel. Start by contacting your existing clients and offering to put together a reel for them for free while you’re learning. They don’t have to use it and you get professional TV and film footage to cut together and reels to show in your editing portfolio.

Summary

So, I want to issue you a challenge and provide you with a timeline. I want you to add 20 new videos to your portfolio this year. If you already do video, that’s awesome. Your learning curve will be a lot lower.

To start, I want you to shoot and edit one new video by the end of this month. It doesn’t matter how bad it is, or how short it is. Perfect is the enemy of done. I want you to shoot 20 videos so that you get used to the process and learn along the way. Allow your first video to be super rough, you’ll pick up new skills along the way, and by the time you put out your 20th video, you won’t even believe how far you’ve come.

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