Not so long ago, before the major technological advances of the last couple of decades, a video camera was a very rare thing to own. People who did own one quite frequently had little idea how to operate it and were rewarded for their efforts by shaky, unfocussed clips with extremely poor sound that would look out of place in anything but a “Funniest Home Videos” compilation. In the present day so many advances have been made that the amateur with a handheld video camera can make a quite watchable recording.
So it is that, where past generations look to still photographs in an album when they wish to reminisce about their wedding day, the current generation is more and more frequently recording moving pictures of the occasion, allowing them to capture not only the momentary stillness of a group, posed picture, but also the things that make a wedding what it is – the exchange of vows, the placing of the rings and the moment when the person presiding over the wedding tells them that their union is bound.
The longer that time goes on, the more advances will be made technologically, and we all wait to see what that will bring. At present we are far further forward than we could have realistically imagined in the late 1980s. What does the future hold for wedding photographs and videos? And will the married couples of 2030 look back on our seemingly advanced recordings and laugh? Only time can tell us.
