Your wedding day is a once in a lifetime event and there aren't any do-overs! While you are on your search for the perfect wedding photographer for your wedding day, one question you will want to ask is if they have backup equipment. Cameras can malfunction, lens can break, and memory cards can go corrupt. These are all worst case scenarios but they are something that can happen. Most professional wedding photographers will have a set of backup equipment for this very reason. With the backup equipment, if a camera does malfunction or something breaks, they can easily switch it out and continue documenting your big day without much interruption. While you are doing your photography search, ask the photographers you are looking into about their backup equipment to make sure that you will be covered with a worst case scenario situation. Below are a few backup things that you may want to check with your photographer.
Backup Camera
Your wedding photographer should have a backup camera that they bring with them on wedding days. This will make sure that if something were to happen, they can easily switch out for a new camera body without any disruptions. This camera body should be fairly equal to their main camera body to ensure that your images will be consistent and high quality. If it's not the exact same camera body, it should at least be the previous model. I always bring along a back up camera that is the same model as my normal camera body.
Backup Lens
Now most wedding photographers will bring several lens with them on a wedding day! We need different focal lengths for different parts of the wedding day. With this in mind, backup lens aren't super important because we can easily switch to a different lens if one breaks. However, if it's a main wedding day lens that the photographer relies on, then there should be a backup. One lens I always have a backup of is the 70-200mm lens because that is the lens I rely on for the ceremony and need a backup if that were to break! I like to go unnoticed during the ceremony and like that this lens allows me some distance. For the rest of the day, I can easily switch between the 35mm, 50mm, and 85mm without an issue.
Dual Memory Cards
Having a photographer who uses a camera that can shoot on dual memory cards is pretty important! Dual memory cards allows your photographer to save every image they take to two different cards that way if one memory card corrupts, the other card should be fine. Memory card corruption is fairly common so this is super important! I always shoot every wedding and engagement session with dual cards.
Backup of Final Images
Besides making sure your photographer has backup equipment, you will also want to make sure they are backing up your final wedding day images! Just like memory cards, hard drives can go corrupt, computers can get stolen, and images can get lost. After the wedding your photographer should backup the final images from your wedding day in at least two places- a hard drive and in a cloud based gallery. This makes sure your images will be safe during the editing process before final delivery. I always have my images backed up in 3 places (hard drive, memory card, cloud based gallery) to be safe!
