Occasionally, couples(and photographers) like to know what equipment I use to film a wedding, Here’s a quick rundown of what gear I’m using for the 2019 season.

A-Cam

My current workhorse is the Canon C100mk2. With a big battery, variable ND filters, a great codec and beautiful colour science, it has everything I need to shoot a wedding.

B and C-Cam

As often happens in this job, you pine after a camera, spend your evenings looking up the stats, watching test footage, dreaming of having it in your hands….and then soon after you get it, the honeymoon period ends and you’re looking for the next big thing. Your dream camera gets relegated to the second tier. That’s what happened to the poor MK1 C100

To be honest there wasn’t a huge change between the MK1 and MK2, but the small differences make all the difference.

The almost unusable viewfinder from the Mk1 was replaced; a few buttons were moved to more sensible spots; the screen has much better articulation; all things that make the camera easier to use. The main difference from a creative perspective is the ability to record things at 50fps, that can be played back at 25fps to get slow motion. Something that I now use at some point in every wedding film.

Lenses

I use a range of canon EF lenses on a wedding day:

24-105mm F4L - The lens on my camera for the majority of the day. It’s not the fastest at f4, but the vast zoom range makes it super versatile.

70-200mm F2.8L - Absolute beast of a lens, creates a beautiful image but too heavy to use handheld. I mostly use this on the tripod during a ceremony or the speeches.

17-55mm F2.8USM - This is a solid lens, it sacrifices some zoom to get a bit more aperture…but there’s something about the image quality that just seems a bit off to me. This mainly lives on the c camera getting the wide shots during the speeches and ceremony.

28mm F2.8USM - 50mm F1.4USM - 85mm F1.8USM

This is my stable of Prime lenses. If there’s very little light to work with, or I have a bit more time to set up something a bit more arty, then these bad boys come out of the bag.

Drone

After a few years using the beast that was the DJI inspire, I felt that it was time to downsize. While the Inspire had a great camera and was easy to fly, its size and the set-up time meant that it spent most of its life sitting in the van.

This year i’ve switched it for the DJI Mavic air:

The Air doesn’t quite have the resolution of its bigger brother, but its size means it can live in the camera bag at all times and be up in the air in under a minute. As the saying goes, the best camera is the one you have on you

Audio

I currently have 2 main audio recorders that I use for filming weddings:

Sony TX650

The TX650 has somewhat of a reputation among wedding videographers as being an amazing audio recorder. It was actually designed as a business tool for recording audio memos, but its small size, large capacity and long-life battery make it incredibly useful in a fast moving production environment, like a wedding. I spend the whole wedding day with the TX in my pocket, ready to be deployed at a moment notice.

Now, the other wedding videographer may kick me out of the club for speaking this heresy, but…I don’t really like the TX-650.

It’s incredibly convenient to use, but for me the quality of the recording is king, and for me the TX just doesn’t have it. Its small mic and low sample rate leaves the audio sounding thin and tinny, needing lots of post processing the sound good. I use it at every wedding, but alway as a backup to my main recorder…

Zoom H1n

The real star of the show for me is the Zoom H1n. Now the zoom is a much more chonky-boy than the TX, but that extra size gives you a much higher quality of audio.

The pair of stereo condenser mics on the top mean that I can plonk it down on a lectern or altar and get a great stereo recording. Pairing it with a rode smart-lav mic means I can stick it on a groom or celebrant, and pairing it with some electrical tape means I can attach it to a wireless mic(which looks a bit gacky, but sounds great)

I have a pair of these as well as the older H1, that come out for every wedding.

State of the gear - 2019