Why I Still Shoot Weddings With No Crew

People are often surprised how few of us there are on a wedding day. They picture a small crew: an assistant carrying kit, someone watching sound levels, maybe a second camera floating near the top table. Most days it's just me. One person, two cameras, a bag of lenses I can carry at a jog if the light's about to go.

That's not how I've always worked. I've stood on commercial sets with headsets, callsheets, a VFX supervisor watching a monitor, and forty people whose only job that day was to get one shot right. On those productions, a big crew makes sense. There are stakeholders to please, a brand to protect, decisions that need several sign-offs before anyone rolls camera. A wedding isn't that. Nobody needs to approve the toast.

A wedding is an intimate day among people who already know each other intimately. Add strangers with cameras and lanyards, and something in the room changes, even if nobody can quite say what. Guests start performing for an audience instead of just being there. I've watched it happen on the rare day I've brought someone else along. People behave differently when there are two of us instead of one.

Working alone means I plan harder, not less. I'll walk a venue the week before, work out where the light lands at 4pm, know exactly which door the bride will come through and where I need to be standing thirty seconds before she does. Nobody's covering for me if I'm in the wrong spot, so I make sure I never am.

Compact weddings, and the Social and Highlights packages, are still filmed by me alone. For the Feature Film and Director's Cut, I review the timeline, locations and logistics before deciding whether the day genuinely needs anything more, and even then it's usually one other person I already trust completely, whether that's an assistant helping with equipment and setup or, where two things happen at once, a second filmmaker briefed the night before on the running order and the two or three moments I absolutely cannot miss. Not a crew. An extension of the same eye.

What you actually get from working small is access. Nobody clocks a single quiet person the way they clock a film crew. Twenty minutes in, guests stop performing and start being themselves again, which is exactly when the best material shows up: the glance between two people who've been married forty years, a best man rehearsing his speech under his breath by the bar, a flower girl asleep in someone's lap before the first dance has even started.

None of that happens if there's a boom operator standing next to me. It happens because there isn't.

I sometimes get asked whether I'd grow the business into a bigger operation, more shooters, more packages running at once on the same Saturday. I understand the appeal. But the thing that makes the films work is the same thing that makes a wedding day work: fewer people, paying closer attention. I'd rather keep that than scale it away.