Sometimes, because of the revelry of the season and the fact that we get to spend so little time with our loved ones all throughout the year except only during the holiday break, we forget to take photos and videos of these special moments. We start thinking then of hiring a photography and videography business just to commemorate these special holiday events in our lives. But do we really need to pay for a professional when we can do it by ourselves?

A professional photographer and videographer, of course, are obligated not to miss a single thing during a company Christmas party or your family’s annual get-together.

They are paid to capture these special moments that you, as a participant, would probably miss. You are, after all, in the thick of the action, laughing and joking with the guests. How do you expect yourself to capture all those small moments that truly make these gatherings special?

Start practicing your photo and video skills for DIY coverage

If you are hell-bent on DIY-ing the event with your photo and video skills, you can start practicing as early as now, less than a week away from Christmas (though many parties have probably commenced by now). Start by planning your shots and creating a strategy to make sure you won’t miss anything. å

Pay for a service-only photo and video package

Then again, you can opt to pay a professional photo and video company’s service-only package. This means that you won’t get any kind of output—albums, printed photos, edited videos—from them. All they will have to do is capture the event and transfer the raw files to you afterward.

It’s a straightforward service that gives you what you want. There are no frills to this package. You get what you actually pay for and that’s good because printing the photos and editing the videos can come after.

Learn how to edit photos and videos

If you are going the route of the service-only package, you may want to learn how to enhance photos and splice videos.

While it’s perfectly okay to just save the whole coverage of the event, it will still be nice to edit the video, get the important ones saved, and just throw the fillers away. You don’t want to waste your hard drive’s memory on a whole gigabyte of people just munching on their appetizers, right?

Turn your smartphones into high-tech cameras

There are many applications and attached devices that can turn your sweet iPhones into high-definition cameras. Thank you, technology.

If you don’t have a DSLR or you don’t have anyone to borrow a good camera from, you can always enhance the shots you’re going to take by downloading a specific app or attaching a device to your trusty smartphone. It’s as easy as that.