What do you really need to shoot a wedding?
The impetus for this post has been the massive number of posts we see in photography groups asking what gear you need for a wedding. We’ve been surprised at the massive variance in responses. It seems like every photographer has their pet piece of gear that they think every other wedding photographer on the planet needs to have or they shouldn’t even be charging for their photography. If you were to invest in everything that people post, you’d have to spend at least $50,000 before you were “ready” to shoot a wedding. In reality, you can get by with a very minimal amount of gear. The point of this post isn’t to tell you everything that would be useful while shooting a wedding. Rather, we want to give you an idea of the minimum set of gear you should have before shooting a wedding.
Camera
Obviously, you need a camera. What kind of camera is heavily debated and the topic of some of our other blogs (for example, this one). Ultimately a lot of that is going to come down to personal preference. There are a few minimum requirements, though. It should be something that has at least reasonable low light performance. There are going to be moments throughout the wedding day that you can’t add lighting, so you’ll need to be able to shoot in a higher ISO and know that you can at least recover the photo in post. This doesn’t mean that you need the best low light performance on the market, especially if you’re comfortable with a flash, but it does mean you’ll want a decent DSLR or mirrorless camera.
You’ll see in many posts that you absolutely have to have a camera with two card slots. I would put that in a nice to have category, but when you’re starting out I don’t think it’s an absolute necessity. Most wedding photographers started out with a camera with only one card slot because they couldn’t afford anything else. There are many very respected wedding photographers who are still shooting on a camera like the R, which is a very good camera but only has one card slot. Card failures do happen, and they can be really bad from a wedding day. But they are also becoming increasingly rare as technology improves. If you do shoot on a camera with only one card slot, I would recommend shooting on 32GB SD cards and switching them out fairly often. That way if one card fails, you only lose part of the wedding and not hte full wedding.
A backup camera is also nice to have as some extra comfort and is an absolute necessity when you get into higher price ranges, but when you’re just starting out I certainly wouldn’t tell you not to shoot a wedding just because you don’t have an extra camera body.
Lenses
You need to have a wide angle lens and a longer lens. But that’s really it. You’ll probably have some tight spaces during the getting ready shots and the reception, which is why you need something fairly wide. You’ll also likely have some close up shots you want during the ceremony that you can’t get with a wide angle lens, so you need something longer.
What lenses these should be are heavily debated. Our favorite combinations are either a 35mm and 85mm prime or a 24-70mm and 70-200mm zoom lens, but there are plenty of other options out there and ultimately it’s personal preference.
It’s definitely useful to have fast lenses – something that can shoot at f\2.8 or higher. But if you know lighting it’s certainly possible to get away with a lens shooting at f\4 for a while. That said, you can pick up a nifty fifty for pretty cheap on most systems, so that might be worthwhile if you don’t have anything else fast before your first wedding.
Lighting
You’re probably going to need some kind of external lighting, flashes being the most common. There’s a lot of personal preference when it comes to lighting, so you’ll probably end up trying a few things. But when starting out I would recommend getting an affordable flash like a Godox. Once you learn to use that well, you may start branching out, but there’s no reason to spend a lot before you really get a sense of how you’re going to work with it.
Extra memory cards
I don’t really know why, but one of my greatest fears is running out of memory at a wedding. So we bring tons of SD and CFExpress (for our R5s) cards. I will say that the quality of cards is somewhere that you probably don’t want to skimp. We use Sandisk SD cards, which have proven to be quite reliable. We use a few brands of CFExpress cards, but since most beginning wedding photographers don’t have something that takes them, I’ll save that for the topic of another post. How much you really need depends on your camera, how long you’ll be there, and how much you tend to shoot. So there’s not really a right answer. But make sure to bring enough that you never feel like you’re running out of space.
Extra Batteries
You obviously don’t want to run out of power during a wedding, so you’ll want a few extra batteries. How many depends on how fast your camera burns through them. With our R5s and R6s, we can feasibly get through a full wedding day with two batteries in each (if we’re not filming), but have more than that just in case. It’s also a good idea to bring a charger along with you so you can keep one charging throughout the day. That will also reduce the number of batteries that you absolutely have to have.
Comfortable Shoes
You’re going to be standing, walking, and running all day. Believe me, this is a necessity. We’ll be writing a post soon with all of our shoe recommendations, but make sure you have something that looks nice and that won’t destroy your feet throughout the day.
Water Bottle
This is easy to overlook, but with how much you’re moving around and how few breaks you get on a wedding day, it’s really easy to get badly dehydrated. You can probably get a glass of water or two from the bar, but it’s a good idea to have your own water source around for when there’s a long line, you’re too far away, etc.
Conclusion
That’s honestly it. If you have everything on this list, you can shoot a wedding. There are plenty of other things that we’ll talk about in other posts that are nice to have and can really improve your work. But especially if you’re just starting out, don’t overthink it. This is all you really need.