I’ve just finished editing a wedding that brought home the significance of photography to me once again and the lasting impression it can have.

For this particular wedding, we decided to use the same location where the brides mother had her wedding photographs taken. We also re-created a shot of the brides parents on the same spot where they stood for one of their own wedding photographs 40 years earlier (or as close to the spot as we could guess!). I also managed to get some shots of the bride getting ready that morning with a large print from that same image in the background which tied things in nicely from a storytelling point of view.

Sadly, the brides mother has passed away in the intervening 40 years but the images remain as powerful as ever and hopefully one day, her daughters wedding photographs will also serve as a reminder to the next generation of how beautiful she herself looked on her wedding day. Few things last as long as your photographs as they truly are an investment in your family heritage.

I get a lot of emails asking me what photography equipment I use. I think too many people get caught up in having the latest and the greatest, thinking the equipment makes the difference when really in many cases the shot has nothing to do with the equipment.

Here is an example. My cameras like many others read the amount of light in a scene it is pointed at, takes the data to the CPU and then computes (based on comparisons with thousands of scenes in it’s database) what the right level of exposure should be. They do all of this in milliseconds. Hugely impressive stuff when you think about it! So you have this amazing technology but you really need to switch it all off and work in manual mode to get the shot as you see it in your head because no amount of technology will do that for you. Spotting a moment, spotting potential in a location and being able to assess light are all far more important things to consider than the gear you use. The shot has to come from you, not the camera!

For the record, I use Nikon cameras and both Nikon and Tokina lenses. The important things to me are the layout of the controls (can you work quickly), how the thing balances in my hands, toughness and reliability. Everything else is a nice to have rather than a necessity. Over the years I have found that Nikons have always worked first time out of the box, have proved very reliable and survived all sorts of downpours and falls. It’s important to be able to trust your equipment and of course to have plenty of backup. Remember though at the end of the day, cameras are only tools - they won’t necessarily make you any better.