My friend Judy Wright of JudysChickens.org is always good for an adventure, so when she asked if my kids and I wanted to watch the implosion of a building in downtown Nashville in teen-degree weather, we simply layered up, grabbed our cameras and jumped in her car.

We pulled into a Toyota sales lot on Broadway, where a cheerfully bundled crowd was taking advantage of the perfect sight line, while feebly attempting to look like potential car shoppers. At 9:30 a.m. on the dot, we all hit the record buttons on our cameras.

And boom! Six hundred pounds of explosives brought the LifeWay Tower to its knees to make room for the 15-acre Nashville Yards mixed-use development.

In addition to seeing an awesomely orchestrated demolition, we learned a few tips about videography:

1. A 30-second clip of slo-mo translates to three minutes of video, which can really slow down your social media posting strategy.
2. Slo-mo is not necessarily the way to go. In the end, we found the regular speed videos delivered more Wow! factor.
3. Plain-old still photographs might even be best. While the rest of us were struggling with clunky downloads and video edits, my youngest son won the social media race with his timely Before and After post, created in the Picollage app.
4. Whatever your medium, don’t forget to look at the real-life scene. In my video, which I ended up not posting on Instagram because I was too ashamed, I could be heard lamenting, “I missed it, I was so focused on the screen.”
5. In fact, if you’re not a professional, you might ask yourself why you’re bothering to video the spectacle in the first place, because someone is going to do it a helluva lot better than you. In the case of today’s LifeWay implosion, I borrowed my son’s footage, which he shot with an actual video camera. It’s far superior to anything I shot, but you can watch it on Instagram at @carringtonnfox.