What Action Sports Taught Me About Filming Weddings

You can't ask a skier to do the jump again because the camera missed it. On location with Ruroc, I learned that lesson quickly and permanently: the athlete goes when the conditions are right, not when I am, and if I'm not positioned before they drop in, that's my problem to solve, not theirs.

It forces a different discipline than most filmmaking teaches you. On a commercial set with models and a storyboard, you can call cut, adjust, go again. On a mountain, you get one run per light, sometimes one run per day if the weather's closing in behind you. You learn to read a line before it's skied: where the athlete is likely to commit, where the terrain will pull them, where the spray or the airtime will actually happen. You stop reacting to what's in front of you and start anticipating what's about to be.

That instinct is exactly what I bring to a wedding day, even though nobody's jumping off anything. A first kiss happens once. A father seeing his daughter for the first time in her dress happens once. You cannot ask either of them to do it again because you were checking a setting on the camera. The skill isn't reacting quickly, though that helps. It's being already in position, already rolling, before the moment has fully arrived.

Weddings and action sports have more in common than people assume. Both are genuinely live. Nothing is choreographed for the camera, nobody's hitting a mark, and the story is being written by people who have absolutely no interest in whether you got the shot. Your job is to disappear into the background and be ready regardless.

I think that's why the switch from filming athletes to filming weddings never felt like a big leap to me, even though on paper they look like completely different jobs. The terrain changes. The instinct doesn't. You watch for the tell before the action, the shift in weight, the intake of breath, the exact second someone stops performing for the room and just feels something. Then you're already there.

It also taught me patience with the shots that don't happen. Not every run gets the perfect frame, and not every wedding moment gets caught exactly how you'd have drawn it up. You learn to let those go rather than force a recreation that will always look and feel fake on film. The moments you do catch mean more for it.