My daughter once said, “Get off TikTok Mum and get a real job”. She’s a nurse in a hospital, and definitely has a real job and a strong stomach. Me not so much. I couldn’t do what she does. I prefer to find people at their happiest. Photographing at their engagement parties, on their wedding days, after the birth of their children and with every family member they add, doing parties and events, covering birthdays and milestones like year 12 graduations and Christmas family photos. Sometimes helping people start businesses and doing head shots and modelling photos.
In my downtime and travels, or behind the scenes on shoots, I love to make vertical videos suitable for TikTok and Instagram/Facebook and shorts on my YouTube channel.
I love using TikTok as my editing software as it can be all done with my phone. I’m definitely not one to consume hours and hours of videos. I tend to use it more as a life journal recording platform. If I do van life adventures, help build things out of wood with my husband on our weekends, go canoeing, electric biking, hiking, climbing bridges, doing street photography, hanging with the grand doggy, cat adventures and what have you, I use my phone to take short videos. I don’t care much about likes or views. It’s all about challenging myself to shoot with my phone, edit in the software and be a story teller of what I saw, did and experienced. I really do it for myself.
But I have noticed that my short videos i.e. ones with a one take, not much effort involved do the best in terms of likes and views. It’s probably because they are short and people get to the end, so the algorithm recommends it to more people. Short and sweet. Think my limping duck and skin shedding frog. At the time of writing, the skin shedding green frog video who looks like he has indigestion, is sitting at over 21.6 thousand views. But I love putting together longer videos to remind myself of what I get up to. What I ate, saw, and did when out travelling.
Getting back to my daughter, I once got so excited to upload a TikTok video that I didn’t listen to the audio properly. Said daughter, asked me, if I knew what a THOT was. Of course I had no clue. Apparently, it stands for “That Hoe Over There”. It was in the audio of one of my videos. I hope no one noticed. The pitfalls of being a visual person and not an audio one. If the beat is good, I’m sold. I like that the music in TikTok is licenced so we don’t have to find a separate music provider and pay for it, like we did in the old days of video editing.
When I first started TikTok, it took me days of figuring out vertical and horizontal formats, how to edit, add text, layer videos, choose music, do drafts, keyword and get it all happening. I think my videos have improved over the last few years and TikTok as a platform has certainly improved too. Their editing software has become much better, and hopefully will continue to improve and be more streamlined and easier to use as time goes on.
I even challenged myself to make a video of myself talking. It was confronting at first to have your own camera right in your face without using a skin smoothing filter, of which many can be found in the editing options. The more I did it and re-did takes, the more comfortable I got, and managed to put together a video telling the story of a big wedding multi-misadventure I had once a few years ago. To avoid random waffling, I found it helpful to type out what I wanted to say, then read and record it as I watched the video so it fitted into the visual segments. Took a bit of re-recording but we got there in the end.
When I mention to a lot of older photographers in particular, that I use TikTok, it seems to be a dirty word among many. It’s no longer people doing made up dances, but so much good content is on there. Some of the fear originates from all the bad press TikTok has had in relation to Chinese spying.
But for now, I’m just having fun. Making videos for myself, to embarrass my children, hopefully impress my granddaughter, and whoever wants to look at my limping duck or skin shedding frog.
TikTok: vicko_aussie