The hybrid pro: Shooting wedding photos and video simultaneously

Wedding couples these days frequently want more than just photos, but it can be expensive to hire a videographer as well as a photographer. This presents an opportunity for the hybrid shooter, who can offer a full-service package at a price that beats the combined cost of two separate professionals. Here, hybrid wedding shooter Jo Greenfield reveals how she makes it work and why it's been a great business move for her.

Jo started videoing weddings when the industry was struggling to start up again after the pandemic and she wanted to expand her offering. She learned the craft by filming the "micro-weddings" that were common at the time, which were small enough to be manageable for a novice. "I fell in love with it," she recalls, and now half of her bookings are for hybrid wedding photography and videography packages.

On a hybrid wedding shoot, Jo will have four Canon EOS R5s with her. Two will be around her neck, one with a Canon RF 35mm F1.4L VCM lens and the other with a Canon RF 85mm F1.2L USM lens. She uses both cameras for both photo and video, depending on which field of view she wants. In addition, she has another EOS R5 on what she calls a "floating tripod", which she uses for fast-moving moments that she simply must capture first time – "the confetti, the first kiss, the first dance, anything I know cannot be repeated.

"I'll never ask a couple to repeat something," she adds, "because to me it just feels inauthentic." Reinforcing that approach, her fourth EOS R5 is a backup for the other three, particularly in hot weather when Jo knows cameras are at risk of heating up quite quickly.

How does Jo decide in the moment whether she'll need photos or video? "When a couple book, I ask one specific question: 'if you could have only five photographs from your wedding day, what would they be?' I treat that as my brief, and I nail those five pictures. After that, I apply the print test. I always ask myself: 'would that photograph look good on someone's wall, or would it serve its purpose better as moving footage?'"

Jo gives the example of the bridal prep stage of the day. "Realistically, how many photographs will a bride want of all of her girls with no makeup on? I'll take just a few stills of the feel of the morning – always in black and white, because no-one wants to see their makeup-less faces. But as a video, it tells the story of the panic and the mayhem and the camaraderie. I'll only start taking photographs of that section of the day when all the girls have got their hair and makeup done, and I know I'll get a beautiful portrait of each girl just having her lips done and feeling confident.

"My videos are very story based, so there's a lot of detail shots and a lot of scene setting. There's very, very little of the couple looking at the camera, because I find that people don't want that. They want to remember how it felt.

"The best qualification for this job is to be a people watcher, and I have always loved people watching. When all of my main photographs have been done, I sit down and blend in. I point my 85mm lens at people and just get these tiny moments. That guy I can see is starting to tap to the music, and I know he's going to get up any second, and then I know that that person there is going to go and join him... The interactions between people are to me the most important thing on a wedding day, and you develop a sixth sense for them. You just know what's going to happen."

Jo sees hybrid shooting as addressing a large gap in the wedding market. "You've got high-end luxury wedding couples who can afford photographers and videographers. Then you've got the lower-end weddings who can just about afford photography. You've got content creators who are sort of bridging the gap, but there's so much work to be had with that middle section of people who are paying a good amount of money for photography and then adding on video. I position myself as less expensive than separate photography plus videography, but more expensive than the stuff at the bottom that I don't want to shoot, and there's a huge pool of work to be had in the middle.”

Jo’s style is to shoot cinematic horizontal video, but if she knows that her couple are particularly active on social media, she will (reluctantly) “do a few little snippets in portrait mode for them and make them a little Reel”, or she will employ a content creator to accompany her on the shoot so that the couple get that must-have content for their social channels.

"I do a lot of different kinds of weddings,” Jo adds. “I do the big full days and also very small elopements where they book me for just two hours – and a lot of them will have the hybrid option because not many videographers, to my knowledge, will go out and work for just two hours, because they struggle to tell the story. But I really enjoy doing a small film for a two hour wedding. It challenges me, and I just think there's so much you can do in that two hours to tell a story of someone's elopement."

By offering affordable wedding photography and videography packages, being able to switch seamlessly from photo to video over the course of the day, and taking full advantage of her Canon kit’s versatility to excel in both formats, Jo has found a wedding business niche with a firm foundation and great potential for growth.