The wedding photographer's camera bag

A breakdown of my wedding photography kit. I'll share more detailed information on specific items in future posts.

In the centre:

Canon EOS 5D

Canon BG-E4 battery grip

Custom Brackets Digital Pro-M kit

Canon Speedlite 580EX II

Lastolite Micro Apollo light modifier XL

Canon off-camera shoe cord 2

Moving to the left in the above picture:

Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 L II USM

Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L USM

Canon EF 85mm f/1.2 L USM

Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro

Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS USM

All the lenses have B+W F-PRO MRC filters mounted for protection.

Moving to the right:

Canon Extender EF 2x II

Lensbaby - original

2x Canon Speedlite 580EX II

Canon Speedlite Transmitter ST-E2

Also in my bag (but not pictured above):

Sekonic flash master L-358

Lastolite tri-grip reflector

Homemade diffusers

2x Lighting stands with Novoflex ballheads

Flash gels with homemade holders

10x 4Gb SanDisk Extreme III CF cards

Remote release cable

Manfrotto monopod 676B

Cokin circular polariser P-series

Cokin neutral density graduated filters

Enough spare batteries to illuminate the Blackpool lights

All packed (just) into a Lowepro Stealth Reporter D560 AW bag & large plastic box.

Near to hand I also have:

Canon EOS 350D (back-up digital body)

Manfrotto 190X PRO-B tripod

Manfrotto 486RC2 ball and socket head

Small step ladder

The roving Kent wedding photographer

Tomorrow I shall reveal to you the kit that I use when I photograph a wedding. In the meantime I show you how I transport it! It weighs a ton, but provided there aren't too many stairs I don't suffer. Generally there are too many stairs.

Black and white portrait photography

Good black and white photography yields an almost primeval power - it has such visual impact. One of the keys is to achieve a good tonal range, which I hope I've illustrated with the above shot of Jack. Further examples can be seen on my portrait photography page. These results generally require a lot of additional work after taking the shot - either in the darkroom, using techniques pioneered by Ansel Adams, or using digital processing software such as Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop. The latest versions of these programs allow you to mimic the effects of all the classic B&W filters in order to enhance contrast. Another key technique is dodging (lightening) and burning (darkening) which gives you very precise control of contrast. Be prepared to experiment!

Noise reduction using Neat Image

I usually try not to stray above ISO 1000 during a wedding but occasionally the light levels are so low I have no choice. The above close-up comes from Laura and Paul's wedding last year at St George's Church in Deal and was taken at ISO 3200. Apparently more recent digital cameras (in particular the Nikon D3) are getting very good at reducing noise at high ISO settings but for the venerable Canon EOS 5D it clearly is an issue. Still at least you can get the shot - that's the most important thing.

All is not lost however - digital noise can be dramatically reduced. Both Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop have this facility but produce a rather unreal, "plasticky" effect. Much better is Neat Image which can be bought as a plug-in for Photoshop and which was used to clean up the above shot. I created a personalised noise profile for my 5D, to make it more accurate, and set up noise reduction and sharpening as a Photoshop droplet, to automate the process. Now all my images are cleaned and sharpened automatically. Very handy.

High-key portrait photography

I had the pleasure of photographing Sia and her parents again on Sunday - click to see a selection from her portrait album. I took along my collapsible white background (which I have finally learnt how to fold back up again in less than 5 minutes) in order to take some high-key shots. Key refers to the dominant tonality in the photo, so high-key means predominantly white. In a studio setting this is often achieved by using two lights for the background, set to over-expose by at least one stop. You can cheat, however, under the right circumstances. In the shot above Sia is lit solely by window light. Rendering good skin tones is the key to portrait photography so I exposed the shot solely for her. Since the background is further from the light source it initially came out as off-white. I then just used Photoshop (the replace colour command) to select and lighten only the background - much quicker than setting up a light. Bear in mind that if your subject is very pale, or wearing very light clothes, distinguishing them from the background won't be so easy using Photoshop, so in that case it will be quicker to light the background separately.

New wedding photography equipment

I had the opportunity to try out some new equipment at Erina and Paul's wedding on Saturday. First up was a Custom Brackets digital Pro-M kit. This is an expensive, but superbly built, flash bracket that has been designed by someone who likes to take photographs. The headline feature is that the camera sits in a cradle which smoothly rotates between portrait and landscape formats, meaning the flash unit is always placed correctly for the shot. Other terrific features include padded grips in all the right places for holding the unit, a readily adjustable arm for tilting the flash forwards and two supports which can fold away and allow the unit to be placed upright. Absolutely fantastic.

I also trialled a Lastolite micro Apollo light modifier with a Speedlite 580 EX II. It's not as good at softening the light as my Lastolite EzyBox but it's still pretty good and it's considerably more portable. These items will be joining me at my next wedding shoot.

Both of these items were purchased from Speed Graphic who I can heartily recommend. They have a great selection of gear, knowledgeable staff and deliver quickly.

Wedding Photography at Whitstable, Kent

I took this photo at Erina and Paul's wedding on Saturday. I wanted to capture detail in the very bright sky but without silhouetting them, so I decided to massively underexpose the sky and light them with flash. The constraints of the shot: time was limited (welcome to the world of wedding photography!) so I needed to use the Speedlite mounted on my camera (no time to set up a light off-camera) and several brightly coloured huts on the beach dictated my positioning of the couple. Since I knew I would need a lot of flash power to balance the very bright sky I needed to shoot slower than the X-sync speed (1/200 on an EOS 5D) - high speed flash sync allows you to use very fast shutter speeds but considerably reduces power output. No opportunity to underexpose by using a very fast shutter speed! I set the camera to ISO 50 and shot in manual mode. A shutter speed of 1/160 at f 5.6 gave me a good exposure for the sky (4 stops below the correct exposure for the couple which would have rendered the sky completely white). It took a couple of attempts to get an aperture that allowed me to light the scene with a single flash (I set it to overexpose by +1 stop) and get a shutter speed slower than the X-sync speed. Provided you're clear in your mind about what you need to achieve though you can set-up in less than a minute.