So, what's the one thing every Maui videographer needs to know?
No matter what you're shooting or who's in it, when you're on Maui, the star of the show is always the sunset.
Our sunsets are magnificent.
The sun slowly surrenders to the night as it falls westward.
When it does, hues of gold and orange spread across the horizon.
Eventually, the sun dips behind the mountains and the fiery reds give way to sharp blues.
So beautiful are these sunsets, people line the streets near the beaches in south Kihei every night and stare transfixed. (Usually, accompanied by the sound of distant conch wailing.)
This is why every photo gallery and video people display of their trip to Maui invariably has the sunset creeping in somewhere.
For videographers this can take the pressure off. I mean expose faces properly, get the sunset in the upper third of the frame and our modern video cameras do the rest.
And that's cool.
I mean, I am no different--I'm a sucker for sunsets.
Still, one thing I've noticed after looking at a lot of Maui Video is that sometimes the videographer allows the sunsets at weddings, engagements, beach parties (and whatever else) to steal the show.
Sometimes, that comes at the expense of losing the finer points.
You see a lot of landscape shots in Maui videos, in the technical sense. By that, I mean wide lens stuff.
When the wide lens shooter is on the scene, his or her videos are usually shot with wide and medium angle lenses that don't do the best job picking up tight shots. I rarely see a meaningful sequence.
Instead, many wedding videos are mostly a collection of medium wide and medium shots with stabelized movement. Good for what it is, but misses a lot.
I believe in sequences
When done right, sequence shooting allows the small details of the day to give us a lot of insight.
When a mother helps the bride to be lace up her dress, I like to see that wide, medium, tight sequence. I want to see the establishing shot of mother and daughter. The medium shot that tells me mother is helping daughter strap on her gown. And then, the all important tight shot.
The tight shot shows me a mother's hands on her daughter's gown. The feelings of wisdom, guidance and generational succession are all tied together in that one shot. It is the shot of aging hands guiding a young woman towards matrimony.
Details tell. And details like that tell us a lot.
So, by all means, the videographers on Maui need to get the sunsets.
But we also need to remember there are other stars in the sky.