How We Prepare Our Camera Bags for a Full Wedding Weekend

A wedding weekend is a different animal than a single-day shoot. Friday welcome dinners bleed into Saturday ceremonies, sunrise portraits turn into sunset receptions, and a Sunday recovery brunch often turns into its own little story. When couples book us for a multi-day celebration, we treat every hour as a chance to capture a memory, which means our packing has to be just as thorough as the planning.

Because we work out of the Midwest but travel often, we have built a kit that survives everything from a coastal Byron Bay ceremony to a Hobart reception that loses power to sideways rain. Our approach is part method, part muscle memory, and part negotiation with whatever weather and terrain the continent throws at us over the course of seventy-two hours.

The philosophy behind our camera bag layout

We keep our gear split across two bags, one carried by each of us, so that if a checked suitcase is delayed or a vendor van breaks down on a gravel road in the Barossa we are never more than a few minutes away from a working kit. Each bag is a modular setup with the same core categories: bodies, glass, power, storage, weather, and personal comfort. The split is deliberate. Chelsey usually carries the wider zoom range and a film body for portraits, while I keep the long glass, the backup body, and the broadcast-style audio for speeches.

The bags themselves are soft-sided, weather-sealed rollers with quick-access tops. Hard cases protect gear on flights, but for the actual weekend we prefer something we can run with. Soft bags absorb the bumps of an outback ute just as well as the polished floors of a Melbourne laneway venue. Inside, every lens has its own padded pouch, every cable lives in a labelled sleeve, and the small items ride in clear zip bags so we can see them at a glance.

A note for couples flying in from overseas: Australian customs treats camera gear as personal equipment, so we usually travel with a printed gear list and original receipts for anything above a few thousand dollars. It makes the green-channel walk painless in Sydney or Brisbane and avoids awkward conversations at the carousel.

Bodies, glass, and the second-shooter bag

For a full weekend we pack four working bodies. Two are mirrorless workhorses that shoot the bulk of the digital coverage, one is a back-up body that lives in the hotel safe between events, and one is a film body we rotate through depending on the light. Lenses come in two flavours, a trio of fast primes for indoor and golden-hour work and a pair of zooms that handle everything else.

The prime kit is a 35mm, a 50mm, and an 85mm. The 35mm is our anchor for wide ceremony shots inside venues like a small chapel in the Adelaide Hills or a beach pavilion on Rottnest Island. The 50mm stays glued to a body for almost every candid moment during dinner because it gives a natural field of view without drawing attention. The 85mm handles first looks, parent reactions, and the quiet minutes between dances.

For zooms, we carry a 24-70mm and a 70-200mm. The wider zoom lives on the second body during the ceremony so we can jump from wide to medium without swapping. The 70-200mm rides on a monopod at the reception to catch speaker reactions across a long head table and the chaos of an open dance floor without standing in the way of guests.

Film supplies and hybrid shooting logistics

Film has been part of our signature look for years, and we always check with couples about how much of their weekend they want captured on Portra 400, Portra 800, or Ektachrome. A typical three-day booking might run ten to fifteen rolls, and we pack twice that number to allow for a reshoot if the weather turns or a couple adds a fourth-day portrait session.

In Australia we usually process film through a Melbourne-based lab for the everyday colour work and ship push-processed black-and-white to our home lab in the States at the end of the trip. Tropical Queensland humidity is a real issue. We store unshot stock in a small insulated cooler with a fresh silica packet before each event, and we never let a bag sit in a closed car during a midday ceremony in Cairns or the Daintree hinterland.

We also carry a small notebook and a roll of archival tape to mark the back of every negative sleeve with the day and the event. It sounds old-fashioned, yet it is the only way to keep a hybrid weekend organised when we are shooting thirty rolls of film and three thousand digital frames over a long weekend.

Power, storage, and on-location backup

Power and storage are the unglamorous half of any wedding weekend, and the half that saves the day when something goes wrong. Each body records to two cards at once, with one slot writing to a high-speed SD and the other to a CFexpress. We rotate four cards per body across the weekend so no card ever holds the only copy of a ceremony.

Battery count is non-negotiable. We start every day with two fully charged batteries in each camera, four spares in the bag, and one cycling through the car charger. A small power bank lives in the camera bag for tethered capture during family formals, and we carry a travel inverter so we can plug a charger into a 12-volt socket on long drives between, say, a Hunter Valley vineyard and a Sydney waterfront reception. Australia runs on 230 volts with Type I plugs, and most modern camera chargers are dual-voltage, but the inverter still earns its space in the bag.

Every evening, before dinner or before we collapse, both of us offload the day's cards to two separate SSDs. One drive goes back into the camera bag, the other goes into the daypack, and a copy is mirrored to a cloud folder before we sleep. It takes twenty minutes and has saved us more than once, including a hotel room in Perth where a power surge took out a power board full of chargers.

Weather, terrain, and Australian contingencies

Australia is a continent of weather personalities, and a wedding weekend can visit several in the same trip. We pack for the worst and hope for the best. UV filters stay on every lens as a baseline against the harsh midday sun that we get from Broome to Brisbane. Clear protective covers ride in the side pocket of each bag for sudden downpours, which can roll in without warning during a Hobart summer or a Brisbane spring afternoon.

Beach ceremonies add a different layer. At a Coffs Harbour or Byron Bay wedding we always pack a microfibre towel for salt spray, a rocket blower for sand that sneaks into a lens mount, and a small beanbag that lets us shoot low without putting a camera on wet ground. For inland weddings, whether it is a cellar door in the Barossa or a private property in the Top End during the dry season, we carry gaiters and insect repellent for golden-hour walks through long grass.

When couples ask about drone coverage, we are honest. Australia requires a licensed Remote Pilot under Civil Aviation Safety Authority rules, and most venues around the Sydney Harbour foreshore or the Twelve Apostles require permits. We partner with a CASA-licensed operator for aerial shots rather than fly ourselves, and we keep the paperwork tucked into the front pocket of the gear bag so it can be shown on request.

Comfort, styling gear, and the final checklist

The last pocket of every camera bag holds the things that keep us human through a long weekend. Lint rollers, a sewing kit, and a small pair of scissors handle dress malfunctions, boutonnière fixes, and the occasional veil snag. Sunscreen from the Cancer Council, a foldable hat, and a water bottle live in the daypack because Australian sun between ten and three is no joke, even in a Tasmanian autumn. We also toss in a couple of muesli bars and a few packets of Arnott's Shapes for the late hours when the dance floor is still packed but our energy is not.

The night before a wedding weekend, we lay every bag on the hotel bed and run through a printed checklist. Bodies cleaned, sensors checked, lenses wiped, cards formatted, batteries charged, film stocked, weather cover packed, paperwork in the front pocket. We do this twice, because the second pass always catches something. Once the bags are zipped, we do not open them again until the first event. The trust we place in that ritual is the same trust we want our couples to place in us, frame after frame, hour after hour, all weekend long.

If you are planning a wedding weekend anywhere in Australia or beyond and want photographers who obsess over the small stuff so you can stay in the moment, reach out and tell us about your celebration. We will bring the bags, the backup, and the calm.