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Hey photographers! Today we’re wrapping up our “Camera Bag Essentials” blog series! Although most of the questions that our Apprentices and our Students have are about concepts like DSLR vs. Mirrorless and 50 mm vs 85 mm prime lenses, there’s SO much more to a professional photographer’s camera bag than just camera bodies and lenses!

 

In the final post in this series, we’re touching on 10 Essential Photography accessories that we think are crucial for any professional wedding photographer, that are outside of the realm of camera bodies and lenses! These small items could have the biggest difference in the world on a wedding day! Also, if you know a photographer, these items make great birthday gifts for wedding photographers or even Christmas gifts for portrait photographers!

 

10 Essential Wedding Photography Accessories that You Didn’t Know You Needed

 

#1: Reusable Noise-Reducing Earplugs

Reusable Noise-Reducing Earplugs are at the top of our list, because we haven’t yet met another professional photographer who uses them, but we think they’re crucial for anyone who plans on a career in wedding photography! If you haven’t been to many weddings yet, you may not appreciate just how loud some dance floors can be. Whether we’re working with a DJ or a band, we love to shoot dancing photos from the thick of the action, where the music is often loudest. And if you’re like us, shooting dozens of weddings every year, multiplied by a career’s worth of weddings… yikes. Neither of us want to lose our hearing anytime soon! 

 

We actually know a photographer in his 60s who is partially deaf in both ears because his work as a concert and event photographer damaged his eardrums over the course of his career, and he’s now totally dependent on hearing aids. We don’t want that to be us. However, we also still need to communicate with each other and guests on the dance floor, so we use earplugs that were specifically designed for music festivals and concerts, where you want things to be less loud, without compromising your ability to hear entirely.  They’re small, comfortable, discreet, and allow us to still talk with guests and each other, while reducing potential damage from years of loud music. 

 

 

#2: Dress Clips

The thing that makes a dress so beautiful is the form that it takes when it’s worn. If you’ve ever laid a dress down on a bed or seen it hanging, it looks wider and flatter than it will when it’s worn.  Just like with your clients, you want to capture details from their most flattering angle. But there really is no flattering angle for a hanging dress! So if you want to display a wedding gown in a beautiful way that looks truer to how it will look when worn, you need to modify the appearance in a way that doesn’t harm the dress. 

 

A really simple solution is to bring the waist in at the back, and clip it with a simple plastic clip. Although these weren’t made specifically for dresses or anything, we call them dress clips because this is all we use them for! As you can see in the images below, cinching the waist on a hanging dress can make it look much more like it will when worn!

 

 

#3: A Fast CFExpress/XQD/SD Card Reader

Because we’re low-key obsessed with backing up our clients’ images, which is why we often use spare moments throughout the wedding day to back up all the photos we’ve taken so far. If someone bumps into you and your camera falls to the ground and breaks, or if someone spills a drink onto your camera on the dance floor, you’ll feel way better knowing that all the getting ready and portrait and ceremony photos were backed up to your computer during dinner hour!

 

This just means you need to bring your computer and a fast card-reader with you to the wedding day. Since we both shoot with Nikon Z6ii bodies but many of our Apprentices or assistants use cameras that take SD cards, we use a card reader that can read both CFExpress/XQD cards and SD cards.

 

 

#4: Lots of Memory Cards and a Memory Card Holder

Along that same theme of backup, we don’t erase photos from our memory cards until the final images have been delivered to our clients. That means, if it takes us 4-6 weeks to deliver a wedding, we need enough memory cards that we can shoot for 4-6 weeks straight without deleting any photos! During some busy seasons, that can mean 10 or more weddings plus a similar number of engagement sessions! 

 

That’s why we own eight 128 GB CFExpress cards and eight 128 GB SD Cards, since our cameras take one of each. But whatever your camera setup, you’ll need plenty of additional cards, and a convenient way to safely store them! Because we have so many, we use a hard-case to store all of our memory cards, as well as keep track of which ones are full and which ones are empty and ready to be used. 

 

 

#5: Computer Screen Color Calibrator

If you’ve ever edited a photo on your computer, then looked at the photo later on your phone and wondered why they look so different, you may need to calibrate your computer’s screen.  This is especially helpful if you edit your photos on a desktop (like we do), or frequently switch between a desktop at home and a laptop on the road. A good screen calibrator only takes a few minutes to do its thing, but can make a MASSIVE difference in the consistency of your final images. In fact, we wrote an entire blog about screen calibrators (here)!

 

 

#6: A Lens Cleaning Kit 

We pay a LOT of money for our professional camera lenses, and the last thing we want to do is accidentally scratch or damage them! We’d rather pay a little extra to make sure that any cleaning is done by professionals, so once every few months, we drop off our kit to be cleaned at a local camera shop. However, if any of our lenses get especially dirty between cleanings, or if something happens on a wedding day that requires cleaning, we always keep a simple camera/lens cleaning kit on hand.

 

Just make sure that any cleaning solution you use is made specifically for camera lenses. If you were to use the kind of cleaning spray that you use on your house’s windows or your eyeglasses, you could be removing layers of protective coating on your lenses that could negatively impact your image quality! By the way, like we mentioned last week, we keep UV filters on all of our lenses, so it’s really the front of the filter that we’re cleaning anyway, not the lens itself. In theory, the front of our lenses will only ever be touched by someone professional trained to clean them.

 

 

#7: A Folding Stool

You may not be able to tell from our YouTube videos or from following us on social media, but Sarah is short ???? Coming in at a whopping 5’2″ on a good day, almost every person we photograph is taller than Sarah. And since shooting up at a subject from below is typically not a flattering way to capture them, we bring our trusty folding stool with us on every wedding days and engagement sessions! We don’t break it out for every session or wedding day. But having an 18″ stool that folds totally flat for storage just makes our lives easy. It never leaves our trunk so we always have it handy.

 

If you’re like short like Sarah, and are wondering whether or not it might be weird, I can tell you that no one has ever questioned our stool when we break it out, and some of our taller couples have really been impressed by the fact that we thought of something like our relative height difference!

 

 

#8: An Emergency Sewing Kit with Scissors and Plenty of Safety Pins

Although there may be other people on a wedding day with an emergency sewing kit, you definitely don’t want to count on that. Plus, you as the photographer are almost certainly nearby as your clients are getting dressed, so when the clasp on a dress breaks or a zipper falls apart, you get to be the hero and keep the wedding day on schedule! While Sarah has literally sewn bridesmaids into their dresses before, it’s still worth keeping a sewing kit on hand, even if you don’t know how to sew. Whether or not you trust yourself to sew someone’s wedding dress, you can almost certainly use a safety pin or a set of scissors to avoid a minor wardrobe issues!

 

 

#9: Reusable AA Batteries with Chargers

Not only are reusable AA batteries better for the environment, but they’ll save you money in the long run! Most on-camera flashes use simple AA batteries, as well as plenty of other accessories you may have like LED lights, wireless transceivers, or flash power banks. We have enough rechargeable AA batteries for all of our equipment, plus a second set for backup that we keep charged in battery carrying cases in our camera bags.  After each wedding, we take the batteries from any flash we used, pop it on our smart battery charger at home, and they’re charged up and ready to go by the following morning. So even for double-wedding weekends, we have plenty of fresh batteries!

 

 

#10: A Screen Protector for your Camera

Many of us use glass screen protector for our smartphones, so why not protect our cameras, which are twice as important and twice as expensive? For just a few dollars, we add a tempered glass screen protector to both the LCD touchscreen as well as the small indicator screen on the top of our cameras. We’ve had screen protectors break in the past, leading us to believe that without them, we may have been looking at a much more expensive, broken LCD screen.

 

 

Well, that’s it! Thank you SO much for reading (or watching) along with us throughout this series. Our hope is that “Camera Bag Essentials” has helped you understand how best to spend your hard-earned photography dollars in order to grow your business!

 

Want More?

 

Click HERE to get your free copy of our eBook: “5 Essential Tips for Turning your Side-Hustle into a Full-Time Photography Business.” You’ll also be subscribed to our newsletter, so our newest content, weekly encouragement, and exclusive offers will be delivered right to your inbox!

 

 

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Shopping List!

If you’re planning to purchase anything that we talked about today and we helped you make your decision, it would mean SO much to us if you purchased it through the links below! You’ll pay the same price as you normally would on Amazon, but Amazon would share a small slice of the profit with us. You’ll get what you need, support a small local business (us), and show us that our advice really has been helpful! Thanks! [Prices shown as of date of publishing, and are just for comparison/reference]

• • Reusable Noise-Reducing Earplugs [$30] 
  • 4-Pack Dress Clips [$10]
  • CFExpress/XQD/SD Card Reader [$55]
  • Nikon Z6ii Mirrorless Camera Body [$2,000]
  • 128 GB Sony CFExpress Card [$200]
  • SanDisk 128 GB SD Card (Two-Pack) [$75]
  • Hard-Cover CFExpress/XQD/SD/MicroSD Card Holder [$10]
  • SpyderX Pro Monitor Calibrator [$150]
  • Lens Cleaning Kit [$15]
  • 18″ Folding Stool [$30]
  • Emergency Sewing Kit [$10]
  • 16-Pack Rechargeable AA Batteries with 16-Slot Battery Charger [$65]
  • 6-Pack AA/AAA Battery Storage Case [$10]
  • 2-Pack Tempered Glass Screen Protector for Z6/Z6ii/Z7/Z7ii [$10]

 

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Check out the rest of the series below!

• • Camera Bag Essentials 0: DSLR vs Mirrorless: Nikon D750 vs Z6 vs Z6ii
  • Camera Bag Essentials 1: Prime Lenses: 85mm vs 50mm vs 35mm
  • Camera Bag Essentials 2: Wide Angle Lenses: 35mm vs 24-70mm vs 14-24mm
  • Camera Bag Essentials 3: Four Reasons to Buy a Telephoto Zoom Lens: The 70-200mm f/2.8
  • Camera Bag Essentials 4: How to Up Your Detail-Photo Game with a Macro Lens
  • Camera Bag Essentials 5: Using Reflectors and Flashes as a Natural Light Wedding Photographer
  • Camera Bag Essentials 6: Why We Used Off-Camera Flash as Wedding Photographers… But Don’t Anymore
  • Camera Bag Essentials 7: How to Know When It’s Time to Upgrade Your Camera Body
  • Camera Bag Essentials 8: How to Know When You’re Ready for a New Prime Lens
  • Camera Bag Essentials 9: Everything You Need to Know to Protect Your Camera Gear
  • Camera Bag Essentials 10: 10 Wedding Photography Accessories You Didn’t Know You Needed