Well hello there again! I see you’ve decided to come back for more thoughts from a first time wedding photographer. This is the big post, in fact, it’s so big that I’m splitting it up into 2 parts. You’ve done your reconnaissance. You have your shot list. You have your group photo ordering optimized and ready to go. It’s less than 24 hours to the wedding. What should you be doing now?

• Clean all of your gear. Make sure your sensors are free of dust spots. Make sure there are no fingerprints or smudges on anything. Double and then triple check everything!
• Make sure the clocks on all of your camera bodies (remember you have more than one camera) are synchronized and set to the correct time. When post processing, if you have photos from the reception mixed up with getting ready photos, you’ll want to pull your hair out. Of course you can go shift the capture time using a tool like Lightroom, but why bother? Get it right the first time!
• Make sure all of your cameras have the same settings. Make sure white balance, metering mode, shooting mode, ISO, etc are all set to some sane default values. You don’t want to accidentally have one camera on spot metering and another on matrix.
• You’re going to need more memory cards than you think! With my 5D Mark II, CR2 RAW files are 20 – 25 MB. At the wedding I shot, I took 3965 photos. That equates to almost 97 GB of images. Do you have enough storage? Get more! Flash cards are cheap enough running out of space shouldn’t be a concern.
• Format all of your flash memory cards using your camera. Don’t format the cards on a computer, as the camera puts special files on cards when it formats them.
• Make it a rule that you will NEVER format a card on the wedding day. The risk of accidentally losing images is too high.
• You’re going to have a bunch of flash cards all freshly formatted and ready to go. This poses one subtle problem on the wedding day, how do you know what cards are used and what cards are clean? I didn’t use a fancy wallet to keep track of this, I used a idiot proof system. I put a piece of paper around each CF card before putting it into its’ little plastic case. When I pulled out a new card, I put the strip of paper in my pocket. Any plastic case containing a CF card without paper was used, and any CF card with paper wrapped around it, was clean. Easy, right?
• Get extra batteries for your cameras. BorrowLenses.com rents batteries for all major camera brands. Pickup an extra battery or three.
• Give all of your batteries a full & fresh charge the night before the wedding.
• You’ll want extra batteries for your flashes too! Costco sells a 48 pack of AA batteries for like 12 bucks. What have you got to loose? Your flashes and your TV remote control will thank you.
• If you don’t own a battery grip, head on over to BorrowLenses.com and rent one. I couldn’t imagine shooting a wedding without a battery grip. Does it make the camera heavier? Yes, but having the extra shutter button, and being able to take vertical shots without straining your wrist is a small price to pay. As an added bonus, if your camera batteries die, you can put AA batteries into the grip as a last resort!
• You need to make sure you have backups for all your important gear. For most of the reception I had a 24-105mm f/4L on my 5D Mark II and a 17-55mm f/2.8 on my 40D. If one camera died, I wouldn’t loose coverage of a critical focal length.
• I used 4 main lenses on the wedding day: 24-105mm f/4L, 17-55mm f/2.8, 70-200mm f/4L IS, and a 85mm f/1.2L.  I wish I had a 50mm f/1.2L or a 24mm f/1.4L for my 5D Mark II too.

Well that’s it for this post.  The second half of this should hopefully come next week.  Thanks for reading.  I hope you find this useful!