E99 - 2025 The Year of Hybrid Shooting!

In this episode I go through why I think this year is the year that Hybrid Photography and Videography shooting will completely blow up. Sure, the past few years there has been a rise of people using both photo and video to tell stories, particularly to market themselves and we have seen the popularity of content creation becoming an integral part of all our businesses. 

But I really believe we are at a tipping point where video is no longer an afterthought or a tag on to what consumer / clients / couples want and what businesses need to offer. I feel this year is when it becomes integral to being a creator and technology is almost at a point where there is no longer a reason to not capture both still and moving images as a part of your work. 

It's the start of a New Year, so a great time to consider how you want to take your business and your storytelling skills forward into the future. If you have been sat on the fence about trying to use video or photo in your work then hopefully this episode will provide the motivation to take some action, experiment and see where hybrid shooting could take your business. 

The How to Shoot Hybrid Podcast is for photographers and videographers who capture weddings, live events, work with commercial clients and work on creative projects. We discuss different topics around photography and filmmaking as well as interview guests in the photography, filmmaking and hybrid content creation industries.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/howtoshoothybrid

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@hybridjules

Website: https://www.yourstorystudios.co.uk/education/#Podcast

Transcript

It's been christmas. It's been a new year. For all those listening other parts of the world. I'm sure you've been celebrating Other festive holidays as well You I have been  relatively busy but my main goal was to make sure I started  2025 without a big backlog. I wanted to kind of have that fresh start.

So I was working really hard to get all my editing done. I had a number of weddings in the kind of  last third of the year. Quite a big chunk of my work really.  with weddings as well as some commercial stuff that needed to be completed. So I just, I just knuckled down and that's why I haven't been doing the podcast as much and I haven't really had time to kind of think about anything else.

So I'm now, I'm in that phase where I'm taking, taking stock.  I hope you had a, a great, Great kind of festive period though. And a good start to the year. I'm recording this first week of the new year. So yeah, I think everybody's just starting to get fired back up now. So my intro on this episode.

I'll hold my hands up and say I was a little passive aggressive and that's not my normal style, but  I'll be honest with you, since almost the very beginning of my business, I have been shooting hybrid and it's the main reason that I ended up changing the name of this podcast to the how to shoot hybrid podcast.

It was known as something else before that.  And because I felt like that was where my kind of, Passion was my knowledge and expertise were, and so I wanted to kind of take it in that direction completely.  I've been really convinced that it would be the future of how photography and video production was handled within the mass markets for quite a long time.

I mean, we're not, I'm not talking about the really high end or specialized photography or videography,  but within the mass adoption of people wanting to consume or create content, I, I have believed for years that the two  would eventually merge into one, that photography and video would eventually merge into one so much so that I.

Was at uni doing media and photography a few years ago, and I did my dissertation sort of thesis, I think you would call it in America. I did that on that exact topic about how the, they're blending into one, how the two mediums are blending into one. And I did all sorts of research about this and I've, I've mentioned it previously.

 Now,  it's been a slow burner to see others agreeing with hybrid and adopting a more kind of innovative approach to capturing, whether it be a wedding or doing other types of work, basically anywhere where visuals are involved.  The whole time I've been doing this last eight years, most of the time.

I've seen people being quite polarized about hybrid and seeing  themselves as either a photographer or a videographer.  But I think that this has massively changed in the past couple of years. And I honestly think it's to do with Instagram,  particularly like reels and, and TikTok  and video in general, just being more accessible and now pretty much a necessity to people's businesses, whether that is, you know, businesses As in bigger businesses and businesses that aren't focused around media  or businesses as in us,  us as businesses, photographers, filmmakers, people are needing to use different mediums.

Certainly photographers needing to use video and consumers and people. In general, they want video. I would say it's generally now more popular than still imagery  in terms of how people are consuming things when they're looking at things online  or,  you know, how, how do people look at lots of still photos?

Do people enjoy looking at still photos on their phones of their kids or  activities that they're doing as a family or experiences they're having with their friends?  Or are they, just as much as they might take a photo, they're now snapping video content of it?  I would say that, that is the case.  And that doesn't mean that people don't want to hire awesome photographers anymore, I'm certainly not saying that,  but, even if you're an awesome photographer, who only wants to offer photography as a professional service, my assumption is that you still want to use video to market yourself online,  and so having the skill set to shoot video at some level, is very helpful.

You know, no matter how much effort or expertise you are putting into that  is still important to you.  And in that case,  guess what loosely defined, if you are using video as well as photo  in whatever capacity that is, even if it's just to post quick content online on social media, then you are technically a hybrid shooter.

You are no longer just a photographer,  or if you're a videographer that also is posting stills, filmmaker that's also posting stills in your online presence or in your work and somehow, then you're technically a hybrid shooter as well. There's obviously different scales of that,  but  you know, by, by kind of definition, you are no longer just a photographer if a massive part of your Business relies on video  and it doesn't really matter  what gear you're using to shoot your photos or videos. 

If you're creating images, making videos, creating content, whatever you want to call it, you are becoming a hybrid shooter. And it isn't, it's going to get a lot more loose than where we are right now.  In the future,  certain that cameras are going to become more capable of capturing stills at the same time as video.

So literally. A camera that, I mean, I know on the iPhone already, you can be recording a video and there's a button that you can press, which will then take a still frame of that video feed, and then you've got basically photos and videos together. Now, if your phone can do that, there is no reason why our more professional cameras, Can do that. 

They haven't really fully incorporated that right now.  And I think that  the processing power to be able to do 4k video,  particularly like a decent frame rate, and then be able to take raw photos at the same time, that's going to take a lot of processing power  and it's going to create a lot of heat in the camera and all the rest of it,  they're going to work out how to do that.

And they're going to make that camera. And, and that is going to  really revolutionize how we do this. And I know that people talk about how you, you've got to, you've got to have a different mindset and there's a different, there's a different way of focusing and composing and shooting  a still image as there is to a video.

And there is, there is a case for that, but there's a lot of documentary stuff that you do during a wedding day. We're actually,  if you were just capturing the moments and you could take a raw photo at the same time as a decent video clip, then  you would be able to use that. And then at other times, maybe when you're doing portraits. 

Or something more creative, you would choose whether you were doing photo or video, but for definitely a wedding day, the majority of the time, you, you would want to be able to do both at the same time. And it would solve all of the issues that there are with hybrid shooting, because all the issues that I've tried to solve over the last few years have all been to do with what happens when you're trying to capture the same thing at the same time on photo and video.

And I've kind of worked around that and I've worked through that. And that's what I now feel like I'm competent at and other people see that as a barrier. But certainly the rest of the time, you know, the other times where you want to be creative and you want to choose whether you photo or video, you've got the time to do that.

And once we're at that place where the technology is able to, to do that and to a really, really high level and is accessible for everybody.  and doesn't require  the skill then you're going to,  everybody's going to be doing that because there's no reason why they wouldn't have one camera that would just do everything.

They don't want to be holding the phone up with one hand and doing it. And again, when we start getting to more of an open gate feature on cameras where the sensor is reading out a bigger sensor and it allows you to be able to do different crops of the footage. So you could do a vertical crop quite easily in post as well as a horizontal crop, whether it's photo or video,  but all you have to do is snap away.

When we get into this, this point, it. It is going to, it's going to change everything and we can't be that far away from it.  And  there's also more people that are skilling themselves up and becoming really competent at switching between the two in the same way that I have over the last few years.  Or even teams of people working together under the same brand so that you get all of the content, you get a great photo, you get a great video because that's what people want.

And so you see more and more of people teaming up together to be able to do that and just offer that, that kind of cohesive service. under one brand or being able to just deal with one person, but maybe there are still multiple people capturing it. Whichever kind of way you look at it, it's all moving in that direction. 

And whether you personally think it's possible to do this well, whether you agree with it, whether you're a purist and you think that filmmakers should make video stuff and photographers should be photographers,  it's coming and it will happen and it's already here. 

Why do I say all this? That's  the, the thing I want to kind of go into now is I want to give you the, a wrap up a kind of nice list of the kind of reasons I,  I know that this is the case. So,  if I start with my own enquiries and bookings,  I would say,  Easily more than half of them now  are both photo and video together.

And I would say it's been like that for about the last year or two.  It's hard to tell 100 percent because I haven't gone through yet and done a full kind of statistical analysis on it. But what I'll say is,  I see the bookings I've got going in the future. More than half of them are photo and video,  and the inquiries that come through now, there are far more that are both than one or the other. 

And that is very different to what it used to be, because for a long time, the majority of my bookings were video, and I felt like video was quite an easy sell for me. Even though it wasn't when I first, necessarily it wasn't when I first started, but the  more I did this, the the Mora was obviously putting video content out there. 

And I think that  kind of between around 2017, 2018, when I, like after I started and the pandemic, I think video was growing huge, massively.  It was like, I'm looking for a videographer to work side alongside my photographer  and I did used to do some photo and video jobs then. But they weren't anywhere near as many as the video only jobs.

And I feel like so many people wanted video only.  Now, I've never gone hard on the marketing of photography. I don't post a lot of photos on my social media, even though I've got plenty of them to to post.  I've never gone hard into selling the hybrid or the photo and video services.  I've just found that by posting video content on social media and not very often that I have, excuse me, I have found that people would then  sometimes find out I do photo and video and inquire about both.

But the majority of the photo and video inquiries actually come from Google. Because I've managed to rank higher for that than I have for either photography or videography on its own. So when people have been searching for photo and video,  they've seen that I've come up.  Now, why this is different is, is that those, the number of those inquiries has gone up.

Gone up massively in the last couple of years. And that's because more people are searching for it. So I'm coming up in more search. It could be just that my search  presence has got better. My SEO has got better, but I think it's probably more to do with, there are a higher volume of searches for  combined services.

And I see more comments on the inquiries about how people are, they've been searching for somebody to do both photo and video without having to hire separate people. And that's not what you used to hear people saying. And so that tells me that the consumer  trend has changed and that now, since kind of the pandemic, people. 

automatically wanting to book video at the same time as photo and not just booking a videographer later on as kind of an add on to the photography  that they book near the wedding. They're actually thinking from the start of planning their wedding. I want a photographer and I want video  and that's what I think's happened. 

The next point would be that the demand for content creators at weddings. appears to be increasing. And I know that for some people, that's a controversial topic. It shouldn't be, but it is. And this is particularly interesting to me because it tends to also suggest that wedding couples value  is potentially changing also, or what the value is potentially changing.

So, do they want polished video content? Does it have to be, well, shot and edited, or could it be more raw and simple?  And if so, that makes it easier for everyone to step into the world of video because You don't need to be Steven Spielberg or, you know, Christopher Nolan to shoot video anymore. Not that they actually operate the camera, but it's probably a bad example.

But they,  you know, they  Couples aren't looking as hard at,  I want it to be this really polished, really cinematic thing. Now, don't get me wrong. Yes. People still love cinematic wedding films. I'm not a massive fan of the word cinematic by the way, but  not in this context anyway, but the people still want really good wedding videos, really good wedding films, but  I don't, I don't think that is the key factor. 

Yes, in the high end markets, in luxury markets, I'm sure that they'll just still want the best of the best and they can afford to pay for a dedicated team to make the most amazing video and it'll look shit hot.  But for the masses,  and for those of you People who  are  in the middle  range of wedding budgets, especially here in the UK,  I think that the blend between a kind of cheaper videographer  and a content creator, there's not a lawful lot of difference that they're getting closer together. 

And so  you've also got to look at what the services that they're providing and What you're going to receive at the end  and how quick you're going to receive it. And I do think that all these things start to, to kind of play a bit of a a part in it. So  what  content creators offer is also expanding  and whether that is adding in extra bits of equipment, like drones and gimbals or  teaming up with another photographer or starting to offer photography themselves.

And I've seen, I've seen this online. I've seen people posting and advertising this online. I've heard  content creators that have been on podcasts. I've listened to being interviewed stating that the, their intention and their goal eventually,  when I say eventually within the next year or two is to start offering Photography alongside their video content creation. 

And let's think about it. It makes total sense. Why would you offer one service of content creation at a lower value when you could potentially offer more and earn more money?  And what essentially this is, is it's the hybrid model. But from another angle, it's not a photographer  adding video in or even a videographer adding photography.

And it's actually a content creator  who's been starting off using the phone, who is then going, well, could I buy a,  in inverted commas, proper camera?  And while I'm filming on my phone and getting the stuff I usually get that people want me to get,  there isn't really anything stopping me from taking photos alongside this, whether that's. 

You know, finding a way to do it simultaneously, or whether it's finding a way to do it in between those moments.  And the reality is  that  if you actually get into doing hybrid and you start to capture days, thinking about photo.  Opportunities and then opportunities to capture video.  And you really start to  take things into editing and you edit a bunch of photos and you edit a bunch of videos.

And you actually look at the moments that make most sense in photo, most sense in video, you know, they look the best, they give the best emotion. for the people who are going to see that back,  you start to realize that there's a lot of the day that gets photographed that probably doesn't need to be photographed, but would look better on video  and vice versa.

There's a lots of lots of days that a videographer might get parts of that day on video that actually look better on photo, you know, like well, I won't go, it's another topic, so I won't go too deep into it now, but that is, that is essentially how it is.  So  that is definitely something, something to think about.

 And,  you know, content creators here, they've been here for a while. They might not be as mainstream in the UK as  potentially like somewhere like America, but whatever happens in the U S usually happens here. Just a little bit later. So I would essentially expect content creators not to be fizzing out  in the UK, probably becoming a bigger thing than they are currently.

So that's something to consider when you're thinking, well,  do I need to offer hybrid? Well,  yeah, because if you want to be relevant to what couples want and they want both photo and video clips,  then that is one way that you can do that. Be relevant if you're just offering one or the other.  Another point is that those who just offer photography in the past few years have started capturing some form of video at weddings.

I think everybody is aware of that. I think if you're a photographer listening to this and you you've been mainly focusing photography,  you'll probably have started trying to figure out ways of factoring video in. And in the past few years, you see mobile phones on top of photographers, cameras,  phones on like cords and lanyards around the neck ready to kind of lift up and press record when the moment comes  you see people with three 60 cameras capturing BTS or go pros attached to the camera and that sort of thing. 

Even people. Even photographers and other suppliers are bringing their own content creators or videographers to capture more detailed behind the scenes footage,  because that's now become almost a standard way of marketing yourself. I'm not suggesting everybody's doing that, but it's definitely a very popular way of marketing yourself. 

And whether or not you view it in this way, the photographers that are doing this are very loosely, by definition, hybrid shooting. They're capturing video content alongside their photos. Especially if they start, in some way, providing that footage to the couples. Which could either be like directly in the galleries when they're delivering the photos, they could just be adding little clips in there  or they could just be incorporating the video alongside photos that they've taken into their Insta reels which they're then kind of tagging the couples in or adding the couples as collaborators.

And therefore  you are providing a video type service to your couples, even if you're not charging them directly for it, it is part of what you're doing. You are. using that for your own marketing, but it's also something that the couples are going to be benefiting from and using  and I think  that's huge because  seen and heard lots of talk where videographers feel like the The photographer might have got some video clips of something like the confetti  shown that  It's part of a reel, then kind of gone into their own photos from that moment.

So they show a little bit of the video of the confetti, then they show their photos of the confetti.  But what, what's that, that that's then done if they do that as like a reel the next day or within a few days of the wedding,  maybe the videographer hasn't processed their footage yet. And if they haven't done their own kind of teaser trailer the day after or within a few days of the wedding, then they sometimes have felt like the photographer's stolen their thunder with that moment on video because the couple have already seen it on video. 

And, well, I'm not here to get into whether that's the case or not or whether I agree with that, but in reality, the photographer is a hybrid shooter because they're capturing video. Even if they just see it as well, it's just a bit of footage on my phone.  So  yeah,  and then  to roll into the next point, every type of wedding supplier is desperate for video content for their own socials.

So, they all constantly have their phones out while doing hair and makeup, styling tables,  assembling florals, positioning cakes, preparing to play an instrument, performing magic. Whatever supplier, vendor you are at weddings,  there isn't really any way to get it. Get away from the fact that everybody just wants content and  they can't get enough of it So even if they were going to ask the photographer or videographer that was hired to do the wedding Even if they're going to get the footage or photos from them  They still want to get their own and they still want to do it from their perspective whether that's more of a behind the scenes or whether that's actually providing the service and I think it's a good thing  Everybody needs that for their own marketing purposes, for their own promotion,  so  everybody is taking photos.

Everybody is taking videos of their stuff. And they couldn't do that 10 years ago because  cameras on phones weren't good enough really to look professional enough to post and.  You wouldn't be able to do the video because you wouldn't be able to process it. There wasn't really any way to post the video because social media wasn't as video orientated back then. 

And  all of this has just changed the game and taking your own photos and videos is now.  You know, you have to do it, and it's part of the game of self promotion.  And  this is photo and video. We're not talking about just taking photos. We're not talking about just waiting for photos to come from the professional photographer or a video clip to come from the videographer.

It is just part of the game and everybody is. Hybrid shooting. And  it's not just weddings. Businesses want someone who can do both. It saves them time  and hassle if they can hire one person or one team that will do both. And I've acquired like a few additional commercial clients in the last year.  I imagine one of the big selling points for me was the fact that I could offer both services in one. 

And  that is just so much better for.  communication, planning being able to save. People who are busy a lot of time, they're busy within those businesses. And rather than having to get them to come and do a video, shoot with one person or one group and then photo shoot with another, you just can get them in once, do everything in one go  and all that time saving saves them money.

So you, you don't need to be kind of undercharging or underselling your service here. You are actually improving the service that you provide.  As long as you can maintain that high quality, then your service is actually worth more to them because you're serving, saving them time and therefore saving them potentially money. 

So  being a hybrid shooter offers a lot of benefits. It's not just about, do people seem to want it? There is definitely a question of do people understand it  actually provides these benefits. It provides it at weddings for numerous reasons I've got into in previous podcasts,  provides it to businesses and other people. 

And the industry industry continues to change around like creators, companies who make stuff for the industry only want to make things that people will buy from them. So  when I talk about the industry, I mean the camera industry.  Equipment manufacturers, the photography industry, you know,  We have shows here, we have a show here called the photography show, which is now the photo and video show, I think it's called the ones in other parts of the world, your WPPIs and your things like that used to be focused just on photography.

Now they have lots of video centric speakers and ex exhibitors.  So that kind of shows it's all changing and the camera companies are all Making stuff now, which is more focused towards hybrid creators. So,  you know, a camera manufacturer,  they used to be very much focused around stills  and just added video features in where it made sense to, because  they could They didn't, you know, they didn't want to make those features too rich and too powerful, and they didn't want to have to compromise the camera by adding those features because the technology wasn't quite there.

But they, they added the ability to record some video in, and it was limited to a certain amount of time, and it was limited to a certain amount of quality, and you didn't have a lot of the features that you would want as a filmmaker, as a videographer.  But that's kind of a thing of the past now. You know, they're not. 

I can't remember,  I can't remember the last time, Canon did bring a cine camera out recently, but not many manufacturers now are bringing out regular cinema cameras, unless they are a dedicated cinema camera brand.  So Sony, for instance,  they've got their FX line, which is more based around videographers, and  they haven't brought  They brought an FX3 out, which was a,  basically a A7S3 repackaged, so it was more cinema videographer focused.

But before that, and that's a few years ago now, but before that, the last thing they brought out was the FX6 and the FX9, and they haven't re done those in about 5 years.  Now,  I would say the reason is they don't need to because they, they don't sell those cameras very much. And those cameras are now, in terms of specs, quite  behind a lot of the mirrorless  hybrid photography centric cameras. 

Because  they can get the video features into these smaller cameras and people want to buy those smaller cameras. They want to buy the camera that can take the photos and videos,  rather than. Having to have separate cameras to do separate jobs. And we're not just trying to sell cameras to video production people anymore.

We're trying to sell video cameras to photographers because they need to hybrid shoot and they want to hybrid shoot. And that's,  that's, Where the the appetite is because these companies don't make cameras unless they're trying to sell something to somebody they're in the game of making what people want to buy, because then they'll get.

Sales of those things. You've only got to look at a company like Nikon that have recently bought the cinema camera company, Red.  And that suggests that Nikon, which have always been a massive photography brand, you know, potentially the biggest or.  Second biggest photography brand in history.  I've now  bought a cinema camera company and a focusing their cameras, their, their newer mirrorless  cameras all have really high end video features  like raw recording, you know, 4k and 6k and 8k and all sorts of stuff, because that's, they know that that's what, People are using those cameras for that.

There's photographers buying those cameras. There are videographers and filmmakers buying those cameras. But the thing is people want to be able to do both with one camera.  And it's not just cameras, you know, audio recorders and mics for creators are more accessible than ever. There are so many options when it comes to  the ways in which you can capture and record audio, which  was so much more specialized 10 years ago, there just was not the choice, there wasn't the technology to do it.

It was something that people needed to  almost.  learn and understand as a separate entity.  Whereas now you can buy a 50 quid microphone automatically pairs up to a device or can just plug straight. You know, you can have a receiver that plugs straight into the camera or is on the hot shoe of the camera or whatever, and it all just works great.

And it records internally as well. So you can have safety tracks. None of this stuff was.  Even remotely possible when I first started eight years ago. Lighting is the same  companies are now focusing less on producing flashes and strobes and big kind of photo  studio lights,  and they're focusing more on constant led lighting. 

And they are making  flash and strobe  companies integrating dual functionality so that you've got video lights with flashes. And I've got this light here. That's lighting me right now is a,  is a rotolight EOS that does constant light, but also has a strobe function.  And I bought this light. More than five years ago, I think. 

Now  the technology has come on so much that you can have such a much smaller light with a much more powerful output. And it is possible now to use video lights discreetly and creatively. And I'm not saying you will necessarily get exactly the same output as you will with a studio strobe, but we're not miles away from each other.

There are ways you can use these constant lights. And also they have these strobe functions, and it just means that  the reason people create that is because it's better for people who are doing  different types of work, who are doing photo and video. They're not having to buy different sets of kit. I've got, I've got constant lights, but I've also got.

Some Godox AD200s and other Godox flashes.  If I just had to bring one set of lights that did everything, that would be perfect. And that is exactly where we're going.  But even away from like physical equipment,  software platforms are doing exactly the same. So  delivery platforms, PicTime, which I use for photo has recently started incorporating the functionality to load videos on there natively.

So before you could put a video in your gallery, but you had to host it somewhere else, they're now enabling you to upload videos directly onto the PicTime platform and deliver the videos from PicTime natively,  which is huge. Because  that means rather than having to have  pay a subscription to a video hosting platform or video delivery platform and one to a photo platform, if you're doing hybrid, you now can do both.

There's the only way that companies would be thinking that that was something they needed to do, and they needed to invest in. Research and development and, and actually roll that out. Because if you've got really good galleries that are working really well, and then you add video and it starts to make things more difficult, that could be a problem for your company.

It's a bit of a risk. And it wasn't that it wasn't possible a few years ago. It's just that they obviously thought it was too much work and too much of a risk to do that. To their core business. But I would say that pick time looking at the future and going, our core business is going to be to hybrid shooters because everybody is going to move to hybrid at some point. 

And I think that that is where they're thinking and  haven't looked at this yet. I haven't used it, but as far as I'm aware, vidflow, which is a video delivery platform where videographers would host their videos is now also doing the same thing and migrate into a, being able to do still photographs as well and host and deliver still photographs.

So you basically got two companies that have started off. opposites, and they're both going into this middle ground and being able to deliver both. And there's no reason why there aren't going to be a bunch of other companies  in different  respects, different  niches,  going to be offering the same thing  because they can see where the consumer, which is us,  is wanting to go with it. 

So as we move forward into the future, being a photographer  is about becoming a video creator too.  This is why hybrid shooting is going to explode this year because every photographer, regardless of their genre or niche, wants and needs to shoot video too,  but everybody  is still, I would say, and when I say everybody, I shouldn't say everybody, what I mean is the people who haven't decided to kind of give hybrid a. 

a proper go are still seeing themselves as either a photographer or a videographer but 

It has to kind of start that that mentality of I'm a photographer not and I don't do video But i'm using video all the time. It's kind of got to change it because If you're doing video anyway And you're recording video at weddings and you're doing it more and more and then you're putting more video out and you are Starting to record video of yourself or whatever it is Then surely you've got to kind of go.

Well now i'm a video creator now a hybrid shooter  and the more photographers that become video creators or hybrid shooters,  the more a lot of videographers will find it difficult to compete unless they are serving those upper luxury markets. And so that is the future. We are all creators.  We're all hybrid shooters.

Yeah, I should caveat that  the concept of being just a photographer or just a filmmaker isn't going to completely go away. I'm not suggesting that you you're not allowed or you're not going to be able to just focus on the one thing that you like doing, which is photography or is filmmaking.  But I just think that  that will only be.

Yeah.  work for people in very specialized markets or  people who are catering to markets with particularly big budgets, because  those people will always be able to afford whatever it costs to have somebody do that one thing and to do that.  you know, to have that specific team.  I'm trying to  talk about the more general middle, larger group market, which  I think is where most of the work is.

And we talk about, I hear lots of people talk about luxury when, especially within weddings, talk about luxury weddings. And if you were talking about  commercial work, we could talk about making  ads and big kind of.  campaigns for brands are proper films or TV shows.  We, we're not talking about that,  but  we're talking about people who are just running a small business, one person, two people, whatever small team, and they are offering a service to a larger market,  whether that's spending 20, 30 grand on the wedding or five grand on the wedding, or whether they're spending a couple of hundred grand on the wedding.

but they still want some value for money. And it isn't just about money. It's also about the service that people want. And  I'm getting so many inquiries where they describe loving the idea of not having a big fuss and multiple people and all the rest of it. And that is for me, the main selling point. I'm not trying to provide a really cheap service.

I'm trying to provide a service that people will want.  But at an affordable price that competes with people who  are good at what they do, but are offering those services separately. 

So what does, what does it mean? Well,  let's be honest at the moment, if your business is doing just fine, then you don't need to do anything. But if you are listening to this podcast and you're probably interested in learning and developing your knowledge and skills around hybrid shooting. So here's what you can do. 

You can get your camera and start using it for both. This is so simple. If you've never pressed the video, but if you're a photographer, it's never pressed the video function on your camera. If you've got some downtime, like I have in January here in the UK, and most people have at this time of year in the UK,  experiment. 

Experiment with your camera's full functionality.  If you are a photographer,  just film some stuff. Anything you see  your kids, your pets, a landscape, whatever, just go out, start getting some video footage and having a look at it  and having a feel of what you think. Is difficult about doing that. What you think is  worked, what hasn't worked.

If you've got anything on your computer from a software perspective,  you know, you don't have to go and download premier pro or use final cut. There are. Things probably already on your computer, like iMovie or Windows Media Maker, if that still exists, or you could download something like CapCut  or one of the other free video platforms, DaVinci Resolve,  and just have a play. 

Drop some footage into an edit and have a play.  And if you're a filmmaker or videographer, your camera is probably an awesome stills camera too.  If you've got the most popular mirrorless cameras used by,  used most people in the video industry, which is an a7S III, then you've Already got an amazing photography camera there.

I, you know, don't worry about how many megapixels it's got. It doesn't matter. I've used my a7s professionally for photography now for years. I've got some amazing photos from it that I've delivered to clients. There has never been an issue because it's only 12 megapixels,  but to start with as well, it really does operate so well as a photo camera.

Just get out there, take photos, you've got the equipment, you've probably got some decent lenses.  Have, have fun taking photos. See how it feels.  Either way, whichever direction you're moving, you can already have most of the gear you need and you have the knowledge  to develop a hybrid skill set. So the only thing that's stopping you is If  you're starting out, it's slightly different. 

I'd actually say if you're starting out, you are in a position of power because you don't have any of the industry  bullshit  saying that you're gonna just do photo or you're gonna just do video. And I actually think for the younger people starting out,  I think that if you've grown up  the way that the world is now, that's perfect because  Capturing photos, capturing video is not, they are not two different things to you.

They probably are part of the same thing. It's just creating content. And so  get the camera,  whatever camera you're starting out with, and  don't be afraid to experiment with both photo and video whilst you are learning.  If you're going to style shoots and workshops and things like that. Don't just take photos, get video footage as well. 

You just see what, see what it looks like, see how it feels to be doing it. See where  the,  see, see where the things are that you're not sure about. And then, you know, what questions you need to ask someone like me or somebody else, that's a hybrid shooter or somebody else  Knows about shooting the opposite thing of the thing that you're struggling with.

So whether you shoot, you struggling with photo aspect or video aspect, there's lots of people you can ask about how to do that.  And  other than that, keep listening to this podcast, please make sure you're following, tell your friends and fellow creators about it, as I'm going to. Be going back to doing regular episodes, which I'll be talking about everything to do with hybrid shooting.

I'll be talking about things videography as well as the business side,  you could go follow my YouTube account, which is at hybrid jewels, because I've purposefully given myself time at the start of this year to follow my passion for creating my own content and educational videos which is. Part of my bigger plan to reignite my enjoyment for creating stuff.

Because honestly, I have, I feel like I've been on a bit of a hamster wheel for the last few years since COVID. And I've just been trying to keep up with doing  with creating content. And I, I kind of have lost, lost the passion I had for it before. It is very much like a job at the moment. And I want to change that.

And part of it is I really want to be able to,  I enjoy, I started the podcast because I enjoy,  I enjoy connecting with others and I enjoy sharing  experiences with others, and I want to be able to help other people and share my knowledge with them.  And so.  That's one of the places I'm going to be doing that is on YouTube because I find it hard to do it in short form on platforms like Instagram,  because I feel like you can't really explain or get the message across that you need.

But on some platform like YouTube or on a podcast.  You can go into more detail and provide more context for things. And I think that that's what people need rather than just a quick tip on how to do something, which can be useful, but usually will only help with  certain  quite simple tasks and not more complex and nuanced topics that I would love to discuss with you on here.

On my YouTube channel,  there are very few other people that I've come across who are offering educational content out there for hybrid shooters. I'm not saying that there aren't some there are going to be some, and you may know of some someone that I followed and enjoy watching for years now is a Canadian photographer called Taylor Jackson.

He does hybrid coverage at weddings. He is, he's been doing YouTube for as long as I've, Been doing this. And he's put out so many videos. He's really good at getting lots of lots of content out. And there are so many like behind the scenes videos and stuff on his channel. But even though things are slightly different in Canada and America to what they are in the UK and Europe, they're still really useful.

So go and check out Taylor Jackson. If you're looking for another hybrid content guy,  and if you want something more specific to help you on your journey,  you want some focused help and support to get your business where you'd like it to be, whether you're just starting out or whether you've been doing this for a while, but you're wanting to kind of transition into hybrid or you're wanting to build on things,  you know, you feel like you, you just need. 

help to get from wherever you are right now to the place you'd like to be. And you just feel like you're not getting there on your own. I would love to help you with that. You can contact me at your. story. studios on Instagram or at jewels at your story studios. co. uk on email. Going forwards, I'm hoping to be offering some mentoring which is going to be focused around goals, helping you fill the gaps in your knowledge and skills,  but I want it to be specific to what you need.

So before I announce that kind of formally. Please get in contact if you would like to, to discuss that.  Right, I really appreciate you joining me for this episode. Which is number 99, by the way. Episode 99 of this podcast, wow. So the next one feels like a bit of a milestone. Number 100.  If you've enjoyed listening today, then please go back and listen to some of the other episodes that cover a lot of different topics that should be really helpful if you want it to grow your skills and your business.

And at the end of every episode, I play out with my song of the week.  So although song of the episode would be more accurate seen as I haven't kept up to weekly episodes recently.  So this episode song is hold on to me by the neighborly. Yeah.  It's got a lovely folk feel with a nice soft melody and beat acoustic guitar and great vocals Which the song kind of builds nice and gradually which is great for  when you're using it in a wedding film  So it's good to use also because of the vocals where you don't have the best dialogue from the day I used it on a film a few months ago I usually like to use  songs like this and blend them, blend the instrumental into the vocal and then use some of the audio dialogue from the day to kind of like go so far and then get the vocals from the song to kick in.

And I find that that's just a really nice way to Of not having to rely on an entire however many minutes long your film is worth of good dialogue from the day.  Thanks for listening. I appreciate you spending the time here and catch you on episode 100. See ya.