Weddding Kit - What's in our bags?

Apart from cameras and lenses, batteries and memory cards, over the years we’ve found that there’s a bunch of other things that come in very handy for different parts of the day.

Penknife

We see SO many new suits and sometimes people don’t realise that the pockets will be sewn up and need a little sharp knife to open! Also, the tails of many jackets have a little cross stitch on them to keep them neat…this is intended to be removed when you wear them! If you don’t, it’s pretty obvious you’re not a suit wearer! (Who is these days?)

Simple Sewing Kit

Accidents happen sometimes! Although I’m no tailor, we can perhaps patch up a small rip if needs be!

Crochet Hooks

Here’s a little secret weapon for those tricky buttons on the back of a wedding dress! These can be a life saver when we’re in a hurry and the dress just isn’t behaving!

Other bits and bobs

Safety Pins

Plasters

Paracetamol and Ibuprofen - we can’t dispense these as we’re not chemists, but if you have a headache we could leave one laying around for you!

Hair Grips

Scissors

Instant Large Format Photography

What seems a very long time ago, I spotted a curious little thing that Lomo were offering that would fit on the back of our Intrepid Large Format Camera: a Polaroid style back for instant film!
I thought it might be fun to be able to get instant results from photoshoots, so joined the kickstarter and waited.
Then the pandemic hit, so I waited some more!

Finally, just recently we received a package containing a nondescript black plastic box, shown here attached to the camera:

The process of taking a photo is even more of a faff than the film process we’ve documented previously on this blog! Once you have the camera set up and focussed, you place the back on the camera and then take the photo.
You then have to remove the back (I think this is an Intrepid thing - if you leave it on the back, the clip you can see in the picture scratches the photo as it ejects) and press the button to eject the photo:

We tried this out on a recent maternity shoot and it’s great fun and helped get us all in to the right mood for the digital shots. It’s really lovely to all gather round and watch the picture appear as if by magic.
The pictures you get from this system can be very charming, but they are nowhere near the quality you can get from film in this camera or from our Fuji digital kit, but they are a unique instant memento and have a very different look to them. We’ll definitely be using it lots in the future.

Our kit

I’m a big fan of the Shotkit website as I’m a bit of a photo nerd and love to see what kit other people are using. Em and I were chatting about this, and thought it would be fun to set up a shot of our own wedding kit. This is a picture of most of the kit we take to weddings. We each have two Fuji X-H1s, but there’s probably a few more cameras floating around in our car because we really like to be prepared for any eventuality! My Ricoh GRII goes with me everywhere, so that’s definitely in a pocket somewhere!