What cameras and lenses should I bring on shoots?

What gear do you bring on shoots?”

I guess [this is from] somebody looking to simplify the amount of stuff that they bring. And for me, I’ll bring one camera body, I’ll have a backup in the car and unless it’s something very, very specific like architecture, I might bring more wide-angled lenses and that type of thing. But for most general day-by-day stuff, I have this Sigma 20 mm 1.8 that you can’t really use below 2.8, but it’s nice and wide and it works full-frame so that’s why I use that. From there I have a 35 F2, a 50 mm and a 135, and those are kind of the four lenses that I’ll just bring with me everywhere.

Dave: And how do you carry your stuff?

Taylor: A lovely little shoot-sack.

Dave: Yeah – so keep it lightweight and comfortable, and you know you’re stuff’s not going to get nicked. Charlotte and I drag around a Tamarak I think it is? It’s like a suitcase with the wheels. So we do that, [and] obviously you can shake your gear a little bit if you drag it over hard soil so you’ve kind of got to lug it, but because it’s two of us shooting we’ve got twice the gear, basically.

But the one thing I always suggest to everyone that sort of asks is pick a lens for a session – you know, if you’re doing a portrait session you can pretty much shoot everything with either one nice long lens or maybe two lenses.

Taylor: I did an entire session yesterday with my 135 – just because I had the room where I could just back up if I needed to.

Dave: It helps, right? It helps for the couple [because] they’re not thinking, “what’s wrong with us? Why is he looking at his gear?” you know what I mean? Because I think it just takes that element of blockage between [you out].

Taylor: Yeah, because once you’re set up, I have kind of a shade setting and a sun setting and I knew both shutter speeds in my head, and I just flipped back and forth between them – keeping it nice and easy.

Dave: Yeah, one guy challenged me to do that last year – Justin [ . . . ] you guys may know him, he’s a still motion shooter now, and he often does sessions with a 50 mm lens, or kind of limits the distance he’ll go just to try things. Like, not for every shoot, but obviously if you want to create constraints for yourself, you’re often forced to find a new creative zone in your mind and in your thought process. So like, going to the middle of a parking lot and saying, “we’re going to shoot within one block of this – I don’t want to walk all over the city, I don’t want to drive from location [to location]” because there’s often a ton of stuff that you can do: shooting down, shooting up, etc.

Taylor: And there’s sort of that “creative under constraint” [thing] where you just actually become creative and you spend less of your time wandering around looking for cool stuff to stick out. It’s kind of like “alright, we’ve got to make this work”, and then it usually does work because it’s just that simplification of everything.

I had somewhere to go off that, but I forgot. Oh! John Michael Cooper – he has done some very, very unique things where he was the first one – that I know of – that taped over his LCD on the back of his – I think it was a – 5D at the time. I think he popped a 256 card in there, so he only had however many photos. He shot raw – I believe he shot raw, at least – because he was just mimicking film and that’s how he covered a day. He was second or third shooting for somebody – probably wouldn’t want to put that entire strain on actually shooting as a main photographer, but I thought it was really cool, and he thought in his brain [that] it was like a failure, but he got some amazing stuff that I would’ve been 100% happy with. But to him, he was just like “yeah, it was a failure”.

Dave: But you kind of have to fail to grow, right?

Taylor: Exactly.

Dave: And another thing John was saying – we went down to Mystic last year, and if you don’t know what Mystic is . . . Mystic is awesome. Just Google Mystic Connecticut and you’ll find it. If you can get to that, it’s an amazing sort of workshop, seminar, hangout, like three days of partying and just good times, and it’s really intimate. It’s a bit different than some of the bigger conventions [which] are too big, and [they’re] about selling product. But with these guys, there’s maybe four booths of actual sponsors and it’s not like you’re getting sold a bunch of stuff, so it’s just a really cool social networking thing.

But I was just going to say that [Michael] was talking about how he challenges himself. He says, “I’m shooting 80% portrait at the moment, so I want to rethink that”. So he decided that he was going to shoot 80% landscape for a wedding, and it made him think in a totally different way. He loves that vertical look, but if you want to change your mindset, you kind of have to force yourself sometimes.

Taylor: You keep fresh that way, too. You have to do something different. If you just do the same thing every week, you’re going to burn out and hate it, so it’s kind of pushing creativity and that kind of stuff.