What Gear Should Your Wedding Photographer Have?
The most important thing you’re paying for with a wedding photographer is the person. You’re looking for a photographer who knows how to take beautiful photos – who knows composition, lighting, editing, and all the other essential skills that go into the artform. And a good photographer can make beautiful images regardless of the gear they are using. If you need evidence of that, just watch DigitalRev’s Cheap Camera Challenges.
All that said, gear really does matter. There’s a reason that professional photographers don’t just take photos on their iPhones. Professional cameras are built to preserve an incredible amount of data in the images. This both gives enormous flexibility in editing, allowing the photographer to create the style she wants, and gives professional photos the color depth and dynamic range that you just can’t obtain otherwise.
Because of all of this, it’s a good idea to look into the gear that your potential wedding photographer uses. I wanted to write this blog because many wedding planning guides out there try to give advice on what kind of gear your photographer should have, and a lot of it was clearly written by a single photographer who is very adamant about the gear that is in their personal preference or by someone who knows very little about photography. In reality, there is a huge variance in personal preference across photographers, and the differences in gear that they use contribute to the difference in their styles. I wanted to write this guide to give you some idea of what you really should be looking for in the gear your photographer uses so you know what to look for and hopefully dispel some of the myths out there about things that are necessary.
As a final note before I get started, I’m writing this in the context of very professional, medium to upper budget wedding photographers. Many of the features on this list are rather expensive, and there are lower budget photographers who shoot with cheaper equipment. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with that if it’s what you can afford – you’re still going to get better results than someone on an iPhone. But if you really want the full wedding photography experience, these are some things you should look for.
Camera
Obviously your photographer needs to have a camera. There are a ton of phenomenal cameras on the market right now, and there’s a lot of personal preference. At a very basic level, their camera should be a DSLR or mirrorless camera. Mirrorless is the way that the world is going and the best cameras on the market right now are mirrorless, but there are still DSLRs out there like the Canon 5D Mark IV that can hold their own and are very popular among wedding photographers.
Their camera should have good low light performance (most wedding receptions and often ceremonies have very little light) and should be full frame – that refers to the size of the image sensor. Crop sensor cameras don’t perform as well in low light, preserve less depth in the images, and generally are less-expensive, more consumer level cameras. Often the best lenses also will not work with them.
Generally wedding photographers should have a camera with two memory card slots. That way the photos are stored to two memory cards at the same time, which means there is a built-in backup system. Card failures are rare these days, but they do happen. I’ve had one card fail in all the weddings that we did, and it was my card from the ceremony. I can’t tell you how glad I was to have a backup! No images were lost and the couple doesn’t even know it happened.
That said, the way that Canon released their mirrorless cameras has made the two card slot rule a little less certain. Canon made their first forays into the mirrorless world by releasing the R and then the RP, which were designed to be advanced consumer level cameras, as indicated by only having a single card slot. But the R had essentially the same sensor as the 5D Mark IV mentioned above and had the advantages of a mirrorless camera (things like eye detection autofocus, exposure simulation, etc.). A reasonable number of wedding photographers jumped on the R to take advantage of those features and have since stuck with it. It’s certainly a respectable camera, and I wouldn’t necessarily rule out a wedding photographer for using it. But in general, you’ll want to look for two memory card slots.
Lenses
This one gets pretty hard to question your potential photographer about if you don’t know much about the market. In general you want to make sure that they are using high quality lenses, but what those are depend on the system they shoot on. For Canon shooters, you generally want to look for photographers that use L series lenses. That said, Canon has recently released some non-L series lenses made for their mirrorless cameras that produce gorgeous results. Some photographers actually like the less expensive version of the 85mm prime better than it’s L series counterpart that costs about four times as much – some independent testing suggests that it’s a bit sharper around the edges.
There are two reasonably good indications you can look for when asking about lenses. The first is that you want to make sure they’re not shooting with a kit lens. These are lenses that are often sold along with the camera body and they are generally worthless. Many used camera companies won’t pay anything for them. They normally yield terrible images and the autofocus barely functions.
The second is the speed of the lens. This refers to the maximum aperture that the lens can achieve, which has to do with how much light the lens is letting in. You want to make sure they have at least one wide angle (35mm or less) and one longer (85mm or more) lens that can shoot at f\2.8 or higher. And note that higher here actually means a lower number after the ‘f.’ So a lens that reaches a maximum aperture of f\4 is much slower than a lens that reaches a maximum aperture of f\2.8. You want to see lenses between f\1 and f\2.8.
Most other differences in what lenses photographers use is driven by personal preference. Karyn likes to shoot on prime lenses; I shoot on a mix of primes and zoom lenses.
Lighting
There are some photographers who only use ambient light, but this is pretty infeasible at many receptions and some ceremonies where lighting levels are low. Your photographer is normally going to need to add some light, particularly during the reception, to get good photos that aren’t full of noise (it looks like really heavy grain in the photos). You should make sure that your photographer has some kind of external lighting (in other words, they shouldn’t be using a flash that is built into the camera – if they are, run and run fast). But from there every photographer has their own personal preference.
The most common lighting options are an on-camera external flash. This is a flash that sits on top of the camera. As long as they know what they are doing, they’ll use it to either bounce the light off of a ceiling or wall or they’ll use a diffuser so the light isn’t too harsh. The second most common are off camera flashes. This means the photographer will set up one or more flashes on stands throughout the room and use a transmitter to trigger them when the shutter button is pushed. One isn’t necessarily better than the other – it just depends on the shooting style of the photographer.
Some photographers will use lights that stay on rather than flashes. We sometimes use these when we’re shooting photo and video so that we get nice, even lighting in the video as well as the photos. There are plenty of ways to do this from using handheld lights to full on studio lighting. With this as well, there are plenty of right answers.
Backup Equipment
THIS IS ESSENTIAL. Things happen. Cameras suddenly die. Photographers fall into pools (just try looking up photographer falls into pool on YouTube – surprisingly common), guests run into a lens. If your photographer only has one camera and one set of lenses, something like this would mean the end of your wedding photography. Your photographer MUST have a backup camera and a backup wide angle and backup long lens. At a minimum. It’s not worth the risk to hire a photographer that doesn’t come prepared with backups.
Conclusion
That’s it for the essentials. Outside of the equipment listed above, there is a lot of personal preference. There are things that some photographers swear by that others would never touch. Outside of these basics, just make sure that your photographer turns out good work – ask for full galleries and check their reviews. And check out the rest of our blog for more advice on choosing a photographer!