When equipment breaks down

 
Imagine you are photographing a wedding ceremony, and right as the bride begins to walk down the aisle, your camera breaks. It becomes completely non functional to the point where you can’t even turn it off. What do you do? Do you panic? Do you ask to stop the ceremony? Do you pull out your cell phone? Or do you simply break down and cry?
 
That is a real dilemma that every wedding photographer will eventually face, and it happened to me last April.

Did I need to do any of the above things? No, because luckily I was prepared to deal with them. Murphy’s law (as applied to photography) states that if equipment is ever going to fail, it will happen at the most inopportune time. Knowing this, I always have at least two cameras, ready to go, on me at all times. I use a double camera strap from Black Rapid in order to carry two cameras on my shoulders. I normally do this so that I can have two lenses with different focal lengths at the ready without the need to change lenses.  In this case, it was invaluable because in the unlikely event one camera failed, the other one was right there ready to go. 

 

 
Can you tell in these photos when I switched to the other camera? Hopefully not, and neither could the couple. Kristen and Mike just celebrated their one year anniversary as well as the birth of their first child, so I finally feel comfortable sharing this story of what could have been a disaster.