If you haven’t noticed yet, Ben and I LOVE Alaska. We went there for our honeymoon and ever since then have entertained the idea of moving up there. Almost 6 years later the opportunity hasn’t arrived, Yet. We started advertising for wedding photography up there and God blessed us with a wedding this summer. Over the next couple weeks I will be writing about your adventures from flying there to the wedding and our personal travels in between.
We were beyond excited when Amanda and Chris chose us to photograph their wedding at Alyeska Resort. Then 3 seconds later I thought “Oh, no. How are we going to get all our stuff up there?!”. We travel a lot for weddings. This summer we went to 5 different States, but we always drive. We just load up the Expedition and call it good. We contemplated driving to Anchorage but our schedule was too packed to take the time to drive. A photographer’s worst fear is to lose gear while traveling. The only way to ensure that that doesn’t happen is to keep it with us all the time. Which we could do because our camera bag is actually a huge 3’x3.5′ box that weighs probably 70 lbs.
Here is our usual camera bag on the left. Harrison is sitting in front of it to show you relative size. We had to get 2 new camera bags that are half the size. They are the exact biggest size that is allowable to carry on.
With lots of padding and hard cases, we knew all of the most important gear would be safe with us. The plus side is we don’t have to share a bag anymore 🙂
I know some photographers would have just nixed their lights and planned to shoot only “natural” lighting, but our bride paid for us based on how we always shoot. And it would be fair to her if we didn’t bring them just because of difficult logistics. So we packed little clothes and filled our suitcase with gear.
We had to make sure everything had plenty of padding because this stuff was going to get checked.
I had to forgo my shoe space for the softbox. This is what I do for my clients 🙂
It was a good thing we packed our lights. We totally used them throughout the day. This photo wouldn’t have looked the same without them!
