As I have previously mentioned in my blog the importance of what to consider when booking a corporate photographer in London. Apart from the working style and the individual capabilities of the photographer it is also a comfort that he or she has knowledge of their own equipment needs to produce a good service.

All photographers should be aware that you do need to use good brands of equipment like Nikon or Canon etc to be able to stand up to the demands given in every day life on a shoot. It is also vital that you never go to a shoot without backup pieces of equipment should something fail on you.

In my years of being an event photographer in London I can count on one hand the failures that have happened with either a lens or body. Even using some of the best equipment available it can still go wrong. But always I have to hand and often already set up to go a back up piece that I can carry on with and finalise the job in hand.

This responsibility of having back up is a sure difference between an experienced professional and someone who is not. A professional would ‘have in the bag’ two camera bodies, various lenses, two flash guns and a stock of batteries. So if anything went wrong another was close by.

Often now at shoots the client would need images quickly and having a laptop computer to hand is essential. Here too having one that is quick and efficient is a must. To reduce any risk to your quality of service a backup of software needed to post produce images should be carried. It is probably unreasonable to have a second computer to hand out in the field but software to download images from camera cards and programmes to do production is easily carried using USB pen drives or even having the programme saved to be re- installed if needed. It has been known that as long as you have the software with you to borrow another computer to get you out of a jam is a possibility. I have even gone to the extent to carry a spare computer hard drive and have a mirror image DVD of it should a main drive on a desktop computer fail at an assignment.

All this’ paranoia’ gives a trusted security to the client who has commissioned you to obtain the results needed for their use. They have more faith in you as a professional and a relationship of trust grows.