Wedding Photography Gear
‘Look after your gear and it looks after you’. Some wise words I once heard someone say – and I listened. Although I don’t like to think my art is limited to what technology is available, I also think that having high quality, dependable gear is crucial to providing good results. So here’s whats inside my camera bag at weddings. It’s mostly canon gear and lenses with some trusted cleaning equipment to keep my OCD happy when I have some downtime.
CAMERAS
I started shooting on my 35mm Minolta X300s, thats what I learnt on and I still use it when I get the chance. These days I prefer to shoot on Kodak Portra 160 film. I have 2 DSLR bodies – a 5d mkIII and a 5d mkII. Laura uses the II when she’s second shooting for me, if not I’ll have the II on me as a backup and the III as my main. My lenses are all Canon, ranging from the 24-70mm f2.8L, 24-105 f4L, 35mm f1.4L, 50mm 1.2L, 85mm 1.2L II. I’ll usually be shooting on the 35mm as I love the depth it gives me without being too wide. I’ll use the 85mm when I want to keep my distance from the subject and capture shots that I normally couldn’t. Its also great for long distance ceremony and speech shots. I use a Speedlite 430EX for evening shots, its super bright and has a lot of scope for tweaking.
STORAGE
I use Sansdisk Extreme Pro Compact Flash memory cards. 32gb are my favourites as they’re not too big as to risk losing lots of data but big enough to not keep swapping them out. I do have a couple of 64gb’s too in case things get really crazy storage wise. I shoot RAW onto the CF cards and also shoot medium quality JPG onto Extreme Pro 64gb SDXC cards. They’re big enough to shoot a whole wedding onto and not have to worry about swapping them.
CLEANING
My cleaning gear consists of Photosol Pec Pads and Eclipse cleaning fluid for when things get really grimy. Usually I’ll just have the Hama Lenspen in my pocket for a quick scrub when needed.
ACCESSORIES
I carry a Manfrotto Befree One Travel Tripod but can’t remember the last time I used it. I also use Lowepro bags and lens pouches with belt clips, unfortunately the 85mm is so heavy it has a tendency to start pulling my trousers down, not ideal during a wedding.
If you want to find out more about what I shoot with, or how I use my gear, feel free to ask me any questions.
