Couples rarely regret this underrated wedding investment and it’s not what you think.
You spend months planning your wedding and when the special day arrives it blurs by in a euphoric daze. Of course you’ll want to remember the moment so you spend thousands on a photographer to capture the details so years later when you look at the pictures you’ll be transported back to moment and remember the details that made it special.
But consider this and BE HONEST
What details do you remember about the other memorable events that took place in your life? Think about the happy and exciting moments you had like your first birthday party, family vacation or graduation? What details do you remember? To help you, go look at photos from those events. At best, you may remember one or two memorable moments that stood out to you, but if you ask your parents or siblings about that day they may recall different moments or they may not remember it at all!
This reveals 3 important facts.
Your brain WILL forget the majority of the details of what made your day special and will at best leave you with a few memorable frames
Those around you will experience something different from what you experience and will have different memory fragments even though you are in the same event.
Pictures does absolutely nothing to recall the context and feelings of that moment. It only showed you that something took place and if it is candid (not professionally posed) it may show how the moment felt.
This is what will happen to your wedding day.
Given enough time it will be reduced down to mere fragments and the details will be lost. You, your spouse, your family and guests will all have different fragments and, if your wedding was truly perfect, everyone will have the same general emotion: happiness. This is simply how our brain works and, unless you practice and employ memory techniques, the things that make your wedding unique will be distilled down into simplistic generic fragments.
If you have a good photographer your pictures will be gorgeous while you and your family will be professionally posed and captured in the best possible way. You might even have get pictures of the venue and decoration. But when you look back at those pictures your brain will only remember them for what it is: A pretty moment in time. It won’t help you remember the jokes that were made, or the vows of your significant other, or the awful dancing of your uncle or the speeches.
My point is this:
You spend A LOT of money on the venue, food, clothes and planned your wedding down to the color of the napkins and font of the programs, yet in ONE year your memory of the day will be fragmented. And your pictures, though gorgeous, will do little to recover the details.
And here’s the scary part.
You will not realize what you have lost. You can’t. Unless you talk to someone else who remembers a different or forgotten detail, you’d never know that detail existed. You spent thousands of dollars just to have the moment slowly and silently robbed from your memory without your knowledge. And how can your feel bad or lament over the memories you lost when, from your mind’s perspective, it didn’t happen?
So what should you invest in to prevent this?
There’s no way to completely remember every single detail of your wedding but investing in videography will help you remember more of it and provide additional context lost in your photos.
Of times I hear couples say, “after seeing the video, I would have definitely regretted not investing in it”. They tell me how they forgot the vows and hearing it on the video was like hearing it for the first time and brought tears to their eyes. Couples are often surprised to see how the guests enjoyed the wedding because the couple, being the center of attention, experienced something far different as it was a blissful blur. But through video, couples can recall the reaction of their partner during the first look. They can hear and laugh at the corny jokes and listen to the heartfelt speeches from their wedding party. Couples can see and experience what their audience experience during the ceremony. Imagine, seeing yourselves on display in front of everyone and hear the cracking in your voice as you choke back tears to say your vows and witnessing your wedding from their perspective. This is something you could NEVER get from photos. And all of this detail would be FORGOTTEN and it would be like it never happened.
This is not to say that photos are worthless!
On the contrary they serve a purpose that videos cannot fulfill (I’ll talk about that in a later post), but too often I see couples prioritize photography and completely disregard videography. Only those who made the investment to having their day recorded come back to say that it was the best investment they made. While those who only took photos have no idea of what they missed out. Scarier still they have no idea of the details they forgotten.
Final Thoughts
You may find this post biased since it was written by a videographer, so I encourage you to look at the testimonials of couples who came forward to give their experience. I also encourage you to look at blogs and forums and see if it is worth it for you. If you’re eloping then photos may be enough, but if you don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on a wedding that never never happened, you should seriously invest in videography.