Simple and Good
My book, Weddings: From Snapshots to Great Shots contains a chapter with my thoughts about the most useful photography equipment for covering weddings. As an off-shoot to the book, I recently wrote an article for Peachpit Press (out in November) about what lens features are most important for wedding photography, and how to determine one’s next lens purchase. This got me thinking about the equipment that I’ve used over the years… especially when I was just starting out. The first few weddings I shot were unpaid portfolio-building gigs — friends, or friends-of-friends… basically, anyone I could find that was getting married, and didn’t mind me showing up with my camera.
My gear? An old, completely mechanical Olympus body and three lenses (a 35mm, a 50mm, and a 135mm), a hand-held light meter and some 35mm film (mostly black & white). Oh, and a fully loaded, fully taped-up Holga with 12 frames. That’s it.
And here’s the thing. The images are lovely. 
My gear was old, but it was sturdy, and most importantly, the glass was beautiful and sharp. I couldn’t zoom into a scene, so I moved around a lot more to get a good variety of shots. I only had one camera body, so I was more limited in what I could do at any given moment - but that made me very thoughtful about my choices.
Before long, of course - and before I began charging for wedding jobs - I upgraded my gear. For many years, I’ve had amazing, expensive zoom lenses with a much wider range of focal lengths and incredibly smart camera bodies with all sorts of capabilities. They are phenomenal tools, and I’m grateful to have them at my disposal.
But it’s really nice to go back to these very first wedding images and realize that, provided a few key quality criteria are met, then truly - the work has much more to do with the person making the images than with the tools used to make it.
Don’t be seduced into thinking that you need to buy that $2,000 lens or that $8,000 camera body to make wonderful images. Are they nice to have? Absolutely! But are they completely necessary? No way!
Research and choose your tools wisely; get to know them intimately so they become an extension of you; and invest the time and effort to hone your craft and develop your creative vision, and you’ll find that you have all you need to create the images of your dreams.
