Tips + Techniques


The Camera Toss: A Technique That’s Turning Heads

May 24, 2017

By Stacey Goldberg

Photo © Phillip Van Nostrand

Picture this: You’re standing in the center of a circle, surrounded by a wedding party. Now you take your camera, set a two-second timer, press the shutter and throw it up in the air with the lens facing down. Guess what? You’ve just performed the camera toss.

New York City-based photographer Phillip Van Nostrand does the toss often to entertain clients, and the resulting photographs are pretty spectacular. Here, he tells us how he’s finessed the technique over time—and, while it is risky and could leave you with broken equipment (and subsequently an empty wallet), the end result, if done correctly, yields a stunning image every time.

Photo © Phillip Van Nostrand

Rangefinder: How did the camera toss come about?
Phillip Van Nostrand: I have to give all credit to fellow photographer Mike Larson. He was doing it about ten years ago when I was just starting out and I thought it was so crazy and awesome-looking! I researched online how he did it and tried my very first camera toss in 2010 (my second year of shooting weddings). I think I’ve done it at about 80 weddings since then, and over 200 times in total.

RF: What do your brides, grooms and bridal parties think of it?
PVN: My bridal parties love it, and if they’re familiar or have seen it on my Instagram, they usually request it. I show the finished photo on the back of the camera to everyone in the circle afterwards and people talk about it throughout the wedding, to the point where I have strangers coming up to me asking about the picture where I threw my camera in the air.

Photo courtesy of Phillip Van Nostrand

RF: How high do you typically toss the camera and what settings do you use?
PVN: I usually toss it about 20 feet up. Auto exposure bracketing with a two-second timer forces the camera to take three photos in quick succession. I throw the camera with the lens facing downward and I give it a slight spin, like a frisbee, so it spins and faces downward the entire time. I can usually get everyone in the shot in the very first throw. You have to do this with a fisheye lens and a full-frame camera—it captures the most amount of space in a photo. I’ve done it with a 17-40mm lens at 17mm, but only because I forgot my fisheye. That was a hard one to pull off.

RF: Do you give the bride, groom or anyone else in the frame directions?
PVN: I usually tell people that it looks great if you cheer and hold your bouquets in the air or raise your hands to the sky. That’s it!

RF: What would you tell photographers who are interested in trying this out?
PVN: If you can’t throw a full water bottle up in the air and catch it every time, then don’t try this. It’s not hard to catch a water bottle if you have any sort of hand-eye coordination but, of course, the stakes are a lot higher with a camera, so there is some psychological grit involved. I like to call this the $3,000 trick, because if I drop my camera, that’s how much I’ll lose. I tried this first over a soft, fluffy, grassy field, and only threw the camera about 5 feet high. I just tried small throws until it felt right, and I kept pushing the limit of how high I would throw it.

Here’s a fun fact: You can rotate the image four different times and the viewer’s eye always goes to a different part of the circle. This way, you can decide what you want to emphasize when you rotate your picture (if you’re at a wedding, that would ideally be your bride and groom).

Phillip Van Nostrand is a New York City-based fashion, editorial, travel and wedding photographer. He manages both @phillipvn and @cameratoss Instagram accounts.

Related: Recording Your Clients In Real Time