Wedding Photography - minimising risk

Having written yesterday about what I'd do in the event of illness I thought that today I'd tackle the other main threat to the wedding photographer - equipment failure.

I've yet to experience total failure of any of my equipment but there's a chance that it will happen eventually in spite of all the precautions I take. The question is, how does an experienced wedding photographer minimise the risk of this happening and then reduce the impact of failure?

1. The most obvious answer is to have spares of everything. I currently take 3 camera bodies, 6 lenses, 16x 4Gb memory cards and a huge number of spare batteries.

2. All my equipment is well-maintained and serviced. At the first sign of any problem the item is dispatched to Canon UK in Borehamwood to be serviced.

3. Memory cards have to be treated with particular respect. I always feel more relaxed when I've downloaded their contents to my computer after a wedding. I buy only top quality SanDisk memory cards and replace them regularly. I typically use 8 during a wedding which means I only store 100 photos on each card - much less of an impact if any develops a fault (although I have all the relevant recovery software required to extract the contents from the card if one does). I could buy a 32 Gb card and use only that for a wedding but the well-known phrase involving eggs and baskets springs to mind.

As I stated yesterday, nothing in life is certain, but with the precautions outlined above the chances of equipment failure ruining a wedding shoot are minimised.

Check out my photography here: wedding photographer in Kent