You don’t need an expensive DSLR to make beautiful images, but there are some basic considerations that entry level DSLRs do require.
By Gary Fong

Working as a professional wedding photographer for over 20 years kept me busy shooting over 1,000 weddings for many satisfied clients. It goes without saying that technological advancements in the industry saw me through a tremendous amount of equipment changes. To give you an idea, I began my career shooting with huge, bulky medium format cameras which lacked metering and called for manual focus and flash setting. Aperture and shutter speeds, for those that recall, were mere estimates set from memory of different lighting situations. Over time, my collection of various lenses and bodies grew so much that I needed an assistant to help me wheel around my gear. I simply could not work a wedding without multiple cameras (one for color and one for black-and-white). My kit also regularly included 8-10 lenses to ensure I had the right mix for fisheye, wide angle, telephoto, zoom and prime needs. On top of all of that, my lighting kit often included multiple units and a whole series of diffusion tools to match various situations…