Meet Bryan Fandrey

Today we’d like to introduce you to Bryan Fandrey.

Bryan, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I first started getting into video editing when I was around 15 editing gaming videos of myself and my friends for my YouTube channel, I did that for a bit over a year trying various different types of videos but nothing ever really went anywhere until I put together a pretty sizable video hyping up a particularly large event that was relevant to the game I played most of the time and got 100,000 views on that. Unfortunately, there’s no fairy tale ending to that part as I didn’t really get anywhere in spite of that. That is until I started volunteering at my church.

I started volunteering at my home church around 2015. I grew up in the megachurch First Baptist Church Woodstock (FBCW) and took my first real serious steps into media there, I started by being handed a camera (for the first time in my life, by the way) and more-or-less shooed away to start shooting footage of their VBS event in 2015, even with the little guidance someone apparently saw I had potential and I really enjoyed it so I continued doing work there. From there, I would become a regular camera operator for the main sanctuary, and in 2016, my senior year of high school, I began shooting video FBCW’s Wednesday night activities for the high school ministry on my phone and editing the footage into recap videos. In January of 2017, a full semester in, I finally picked up my first camera and the more I shot the more I learned and the better my videos got. Shooting those recaps videos convinced me to take a further step of faith and focus my college career on production, so I started in the ‘Television Production Technologies’ program at Chattahoochee Technical College which also helped me improve my skills massively.

In August of 2017, I finally tried to seriously approach photography for the first time and as I continued to shoot for FBCW, I started shooting photos and video at the same time and carried that over into the first concert I ever shot in October of 2017, Andy Mineo’s Friends & Family tour, which I had the opportunity to shoot thanks to a friend of my parents working on part of the tour. I went on to shoot one more show before the end of 2017 and from there, I was able to start leveraging the little bit of experience I had and pick up more shows here and there. I shot a couple more shows in 2018, one of them being my first Winter Jam, which was my first ever arena show, a sold-out State Farm Arena hosted Skillet as the headlining act that year, I was totally hooked by then. The adrenaline of trying to catch every shot I could on such a large stage was electric. From that point, I knew shooting music was something I absolutely loved doing, whether that was shooting worship in a church setting, or shooting shows in venues big or small, and I’ve had the opportunity to continue doing both. I shot for Social Club Misfits, one of my favorite artists period, a few months later in 2018 at a much smaller show than Winter Jam, but still one of my favorites. I mostly focused on my work at FBCW for the rest of that year and began an internship with the high school ministry later in that year which allowed me to bring my vision to a lot of their content, including photos, graphics, and videos.

2019, and the bit of 2020 that has unfolded so far have been incredible already. I’ve now shot three Winter Jam shows in total, and more than a dozen others in the short time I’ve been able to do this including for artists such as Crowder, Hillsong Worship, UNITED, and Young & Free, King’s Kaleidoscope, Hulvey, Wande, Tedashii, WhatupRG, Elevation Worship, and many many more.

The dream going forward is to try and get on staff with a church, or tour with an artist if possible, even if just for a short time. I’ve also had the opportunity to meet some other photographers that have helped me along the way, like Dalton Lewis, who you featured a few months ago. He’s been a major force in helping me get some of these shows and pushing me out of my comfort zone in a lot of cases, working with him has been incredible.

Has it been a smooth road?
As a whole, I think it’s been fairly smooth. Definitely not perfect, starting off at first was kind of tricky to find my bearings, the who and how to email and all that not as fun stuff as shooting the shows. It’s kind of funny to think about now, but initially I was kind of nervous about sending emails because I really cared about the first few shows I took a shot for, but the more I did it the easier it got. Getting ghosted still happens and it still kind of sucks, but it’s part of it. More recently, I’ve been able to meet with managers and artists in person before and after some shows, and that form of networking has been a bit tricky for me as well because I’m pretty naturally introverted. But overall every show has been teaching me something, whether it was a good or bad experience hasn’t changed that fact so it’s been worth it either way.

We’d love to hear more about your work.
So my main focus with my company is trying to provide whatever creative services I can with a focus on churches and musical artists. My goal is to try and show the church, ministry, event, or an artist, in the best possible light and give them content they can be proud of. A major focus for me has always been to try and capture the energy of a moment and show what happened in the room. I want the people that were there to be able to relive the experience and hopefully give anyone else a taste of what it was like.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
I have noticed a lot of pages I follow online are leaning into the individual styles of their photographers more and leveraging their specific vision to set them apart, I think we could be moving into a trend right now that might result in visual content getting crazier and crazier as time goes on.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.bryanfandrey.com/
• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/editorbryan/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bryanfandreyphoto

Image Credit:
Personal Photo – Dalton Lewis

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