Our photography & videography equipment for a wedding shoot

After our wonderful wedding shoot at the amazing Highden Estate yesterday, a wonderful venue we will be showcasing and reviewing soon, we thought we would take a snap of the equipment we emptied from the car, honestly we take less on our family holidays!

Photography equipment for a wedding shoot

We shoot on four Nikon D850 cameras. Some photographers will only shoot on primes, whilst others swear by zooms. Both have their pros and cons – so we use both! Primes pros are that the aperture is wider and they’ll serve you better in low light. Zooms enable you to switch focal length during parts of the day when you can’t zoom with your feet (i.e. the ceremony!) we use a mix of a 70-200mm f2.8. 24-70mm f 2.8m 8-15mm f3.5mm, 12mm f2, 24mm f1.4, 35mm f1.4, 50mm f1.4, 85mm f1.4, 135mm f2, 20mm f1.8, 105mm f2.8 macro lenses. But usually it’s the 35 1.4 and 85 1.4 & a couple of Nikon zoom lenses for the majority of the day. To support these we take many batteries, memory cards & various filters.

We use a Zhiyun camera bag. It’s brilliant – lasted for years, still as good as it was when I first got it. And as for portable extra lighting we use 2 Nikon top of the range speedlights with coloured gels, reflectors and a variable snoot for our portable lighting. We love them – they all talk to each other though our phottix flash trigger system enabling high speed flash on those ultra sunny days
More often than not our shoots demand us to shoot both photographic stills and video. Photographers like us who work on location in low light situations have previously relied on flashguns to add any additional lighting. With the benefits of being able to modify to soften, gel or tightly control the light source we were very familiar with using flash both on and off camera. However this did not offer a solution for video and in fact actively degraded the quality of the filming work by the presence of the flash adding a much brighter light which is strobing on and off at various speeds.
The answer was to find a suitable continuous light source that was also a flash gun, our Rotolight system was the answer, we use the lights outdoors often matching the light temperature to add that little extra fill to soften the shadows or to act as light source for those special golden hour shoots, when we move on to the dance floor the lights can become invaluable for both photos and video when the DJ decides to cut the lights during the first dance.
To ensure we have the colours all matching with the different light sources we carry our trusted Sekonic light meter, the prefect tool to get the right colour for our wedding photography and film work
We use the best XF and XQD memory cars available…Nikon, we us highspeed Scandisk and Lexar SD cards for ensuring our footage is safe! We’d advise using the 128GB size so you don’t have to swap it during the wedding day. We would normally have around 8 cards to ensure we never run out!
We have a whole load of different stands and straps and tapes and accessories for making sure we can get a light pretty much wherever we need it.

Videography equipment for a wedding shoot

We use the best video camcorders & DSLRS available to shoot our wedding videos, Panasonic based; for a single camera Directors Cut film we use the camcorder for film work with a Sennheiser shogun mic plus a separate 32 bit float audio system with Lavalier microphones to capture the ceremony and speeches with an amazing depth of sound
For stability, especially when filming the ceremony our Manfrotto tripod is always by our side, when you watch the wedding film back on a large screen any little signs of movement shows, having the camera mounted on a tripod ensures stability
With our cinematic options we add two Panasonic GH cameras along with Zhyiun gimbals. As wedding videographers, finding a gimbal that works well in high stress, fast moving environments was not easy!

Drone for our Wedding Shoot

We often use a drone for wedding photography & videography, it may be just to get that group shot or a spectacular shot of your wedding venue, being very portable they have become an invaluable part of wedding videography kit, we also carry special filters to add some effects to our aerial wedding video and photo work
Smoke flares for weddings
These are not in the photo as we used them! If we get the chance, weather being an important factor we can provide smoke bombs for your wedding photos and video, yesterdays shoot was epic, the whole bridal party walking down the slopes of the Highden Estate holding, blue, green, red, orange, white and purple flares provided a spectacle, even the owners of Highden came to have a look!
We photographed the smoke bombs and the videoed from the ground and sky using the drone

What else!
Coffee flasks, water bottle. protein bars! not forgetting the phone to check off the wedding couples photoshoot list during the day!

Our essential wedding shooting kit we feel sets us apart and enables us to offer a unique and premium photo and video shoot at the highest possible quality, we offer a professional wedding photography and videography combo package for only £1790 which we believe offers unbeatable value.