So how many memory cards do you need to shoot a wedding? Several more than you actually possess. Your shooting rate will increase automatically to fill up all the cards you have before that cake is even cut. I took 8 1gb cards and that was woefully short.

The problem of running out of card space is a real danger. It means that you are going to quickly try and free up space - deleting duds and duplicates by assessing them in-camera. In the hurly burly of the wedding you'll probably delete the wrong ones - or maybe nervous fingers will hit that "delete all" button by mistake. Or you just may run out of space entirely before you have all the shots.

Portable disk storage? For backing up, these or a laptop are essential. There are some nice models on the market, but I wonder how I would have got on transferring cards and reformatting them during the course of the event? Ok once you have some free time, but I don't fancy this sort of image transfer while in the thick of it. Again, I could foresee risks here. I had a laptop, and I took the opportunity later in the proceedings to back everything up, but by then all the big photo sessions were past. Another solution is to have a handy sidekick who you can just toss cards to as you fill 'em up and they can do it. A bit like the old pro's tossing their Hasselblad backs to and fro.

Rather than risk these problems, I would just take more cards, and for a similar event I would take twice as many. I would probably take 16 1gb cards. I don't fancy cards any bigger than that - I can imagine an 8gb card slipping out the fingers and down a drain at the crucial moment with c. 500 images on it. Even 2gb makes me feel jittery, but you have to make a trade-off between changing cards a lot and security. Actually I just saw that the new Nikon D3 has the ability to fill two cards at once. An automatic backup feature. In this case putting 2 8gb cards in seems a nice solution. However I don't have one of these.

Because things are sometimes happening quickly, you need to be pretty slick about changing cards. Put a new card in early if you know the action is going to start. Also, and this is probably obvious to everyone except me, devise a method of keeping used cards and full cards separate. Something sophisticated like putting full ones in your right pocket and empty ones in your left. And remember which is which. I had one embarrassing moment when I had to change a card quickly, and I put a full one back in. Meaning shouts of "wait a minute" "do it again" etc

I started seriously running out of space towards the end and I reverted to shooting JPEG instead of RAW. This gave me a lot more room, but I regretted it as soon as I started working on the images. I'm accustomed to underexposing and then adjusting in photoshop. With RAW fies this is a breeze - with JPEG it's not a good idea. I found many of the JPEGs couldn't be easily rescued without sacrificing something in terms of quality.

A few months ago I talked about shooting a family wedding and the logistical and management problems I encountered. I also came to a few conclusions about equipment and technical matters. Things that I would change if I did it again. Professionals won't find anything startling here, but someone in the same situation as me might find something useful.

I took quite a bit of equipment with me but I shot the whole thing using the following.

Canon EOS20D 17-85mm (34 shots)
Canon EOS5D all lenses (487 shots)
of which

• 16-35 F2.8L (125 shots)
• 24-70 F2.8L (309 shots)
• 70-200 F2.8L IS (52 shots)

This tells an interesting story. I took the EOS20D mainly as a backup, and in the end I didn't use it much. For example I didn't really use it as a second body - I preferred to change lenses on the EOS5D. When I did use it it was because I was running out of memory cards, but that's another story. In an ideal world I would take 2 EOS5D bodies. Why? I'm not sure, but I guess I found even the slight change in operation between the two a bit of a put-off, plus at the back of my mind I wanted all the images similar size/resolution. Maybe more a psychological thing this.

Assuming I had 2 EOS5D's, what lens combination would I use? Well I know that I put the 16-35 on the camera only to do group shots - so that didn't mean chopping and changing much - all of those were done in one or two continuous shoots. Quite a few of the group shots required wider than 24mm, although if possible I might have been better trying to use longer focal length in some to avoid distortion.

The 70-200mm was a different kettle of fish. I found I was often wanting to mount it because the 24-70mm wasn't quite long enough. I think now I know the attraction of the 24-105mm - it probably has just that extra amount of reach to avoid this.

However where I found the 70-200mm really useful was during the ceremony. I was allowed to shoot here as long as I remained at the back and was unobtrusive (no 600mm F4 then!). Here the lens worked very well, combination of handling, fast aperture and IS. I should say also that the EOS5D is a whole lot quieter than the EOS20D which sounds like a rifle shot in comparison.

The conclusion? 2 EOS5D's (or equivalent) with 16-35 and 24-105 would be my preferred set up if I did it again, with the 70-200mm for special shots.

In the next post I'll talk about some other technical and equipment issues (JPEG or RAW? Flash and tripods, memory cards and readers etc)