Yesterday I went to a wedding. I wasn't a friend of the bride or groom, I was called on to shoot video of the wedding. They needed someone on short notice, and the bride's parents remembered I had mentioned doing video work in the past. As a video guy, weddings always make me kind of nervous. For the bride, it's one of the biggest events of her life, if not the biggest. And I don't want to screw that up. In this case, I was using someone else's camera and equipment, which I wasn't familiar with, which made things a bit harder. But all in all, I think it went well. I stood back and shot video as a young millenial couple began their life together. Afterwards, that got me thinking about the first few weddings I shot video of back in the late 1980's, and the way the world has changed since then. Since I've been blogging and learning about the way the world works in the internet/laptop/smart phone age, this is a constant theme for me.
I first shot video of a wedding about two years before yesterday's bride was born. At one of those early weddings, I borrowed a betacam from work. It was a monstrous, 35 pound professional video camera that cost $50,000. If you remember the big TV news cameras of the late 80's, that's the kind I'm talking about. The consumer camera I used yesterday was about 1/3 the size of the battery of that big betacam. The tiny video camera I used yesterday was HD quality, far better than the betacam. In the 1980's, a good quality edit bay to edit that betacam video cost half a million dollars. Now you can edit video with a $600 laptop. A top of the line video editing computer might cost $5,000.
In the late 1980's, the photographers at a wedding, both the hired pro and amateurs, used 35mm film, so they limited their photos to just those that were necessary to avoid developing costs. Yesterday's pro photographers used digital cameras, allowing them a nearly unlimited amount of shots. The first bulky car phones had just come out in the late 80's, and no one had one at the weddings I shot video of. Yesterday, I watched the brides maids, grooms men, and nearly everyone else at the event taking photos and scrolling through their smart phones when nothing else was going on.
On one level, the wedding yesterday was very similar to those where I shot video years ago. There was a ceremony in a church, then a reception with toasts, dancing, cake cutting, the bouquet toss, and the garter toss. On another level, it was much different. People around the city, the country, maybe even around the world saw pics of the wedding as it happened. I learned late in the ceremony that the bride and groom weren't going on a honeymoon, they were both going back to work and school the next day. You rarely saw that happen in the 80's. On one hand, yesterday's couple has access to all this amazing technology. On another hand, they live in a time where it's much harder to make a really good living. In the 80's, many people still worked a single job for long periods of time, if not their whole career. In today's 21st century high tech world, I read recently that most people starting out today will work 4 to 6 careers in their lifetime. Not 4 to 6 jobs, but different careers. The retirement pensions from those lifetime jobs are largely gone. People today have to figure out their retirement plan by themselves. In addition, tens of thousands of jobs, if not actually millions, have been taken over by robots or transferred to lower wage countries. The young couple I met yesterday are starting their life together in a tumultuous time of continual change in technology, work, and everyday life. It may be decades before things really settle down to a calmer state.
Job security is virtually a thing of the past, because even huge corporations now go bankrupt because they have trouble keeping pace with the changing times. Hewlett Packard, a technology giant, recently announced they will be laying off about 25,000 people. A Miller/Coors brewery an hour away from here is closing down, complaining that micro-brew beers are taking its market share. Stories like these are on the news nearly every week. What is life going to be like for that young couple married yesterday? What's it going to be like for older people like me, who have to re-invent ourselves after an industry we were in collapsed? These are things I wrestle with every day. We are living in interesting times, and it looks like they'll be interesting and changing rapidly for a long time to come.
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