Chris Giles
Quirkly wedding photographer, Chris Giles, talks kit and lighting setups
Iexclusively shoot weddings and do so in a fusion style, because so many aspects and angles need covering. I’ll use almost every lens to do this. I’ll use a 70-200mm, a 35mm and 85mm for prep shots. For portraits, I’ll use a 35mm, 50mm and 85mm trinity.
In the evening I might use a 85mm f/1.4l, a 16-35mm and a set of strobes are invaluable.
Low light and night shots are my ‘thing’, so I’ll strobe up multiple flash heads that are lithium powered. This is ideal as a fast recharge on the dancefloor allows me to shoot at 7fps. I’ve been impressed with the power of the Godox AD200’S for sheer output. Similarly, I’ve become uber dependant on an LED for more atmospheric night time shots.
I have some extras in my kit – tacky wax for ring shots, metal rods for floating bouquet shots and I’ll often improvise my surroundings with anything I can find to keep things fresh. It’s not odd to find me unscrewing a lampshade so I can shoot through it and frame a subject.
An essential part of my setup is having good backup solutions. I run two cameras with dual cards at the same time, always have a spare body and always have a bulletproof file storage system in place. I keep two copies of the Raw files on my computer, one in Dropbox (compressed DNG for fast uploading), an external drive holds a copy, and a Drobo 5D backs up all my drives on a weekly basis. But the most important part of your kit should be you. Barrel rolls with a camera are hard, look after yourself!