January 14th, 2010:

Tomorrow Felicia and I are shooting Jenn and Dave’s wedding in Laguna Beach, so I thought today would be a great chance to give you a glimpse into my day before rituals before a wedding.

My work starts by brewing a giant pot of coffee, then charging that massive pile of lithium you see above:
We have 4 batteries for each of our Canon 5Ds and 3 Batteries for our Canon 7D.  In addition, I charge 4 sets of  4 AAs to use in my flashes (this is all charging right this moment as I write this), and have a backup box of fresh AAs in the trunk of the car.  We do our best to use as few non-rechargeable batteries as possible (a meager step in doing less harm to the planet), but I am compulsive and never want to run out of power for anything we use.

After I get the chargers humming, I go though and format all my memory cards (all 112GB  of them) so they will be fresh and ready to go. When I have to change cards in the middle of a critical moment tomorrow, the last thing I want to do is stick the card in the camera and find it’s still full of images from last week’s shoot.   While I have all three cameras in hand, I also check to be sure all the internal clocks are aligned, so when I import all the images from the wedding, the images will show up in chronological order, no matter which camera they were shot on. I proceed to clean all my lenses and get everything packed in our bags and ready to go, triple checking all the while.  This process tends to takes up the entire living room floor.

By this point the coffee has started to churn in my stomach, so I head to the kitchen for some peanut butter toast, or a burrito or something (today though, it was a cup of Yoplait Blueberry Greek yogurt, which within 10 minutes I realized its paltry 130 calories isn’t going to to the trick).

After brunch, I return to my computer and make sure everything I have been working on is properly backed up and I have plenty of room for the 100GB+  of wedding photos that is coming its way.  I also check the pair of 250GB drives that I take with me to wedding, to make sure they are empty so I can immediately double and triple backup everything that touches my laptop’s hard drive.   This is VERY important for any of you aspiring photographers out there: everything, at all times, must be backed up in at LEAST 3 locations.

Once I am sure everything is in order, I make it my goal to relax the rest of the day – spend some time with my wife, catch a movie, go to the gym, cook us a nice dinner, etc.  Anything to get me in a calm state of mind before tomorrow begins, because when it does, I know I will be on my feet for 15 hours, squatting, running, climbing, charming in-laws and other extended family members, shooting pictures until my index finger is raw (think playing to much Nintendo when you were a kid and your thumbs would get raw) and essentially pushing myself to 110% to do the best for our clients.

Sunday morning I will feel like I was hit by a bus, but I will still happily drag myself to my computer and eagerly look through the images of someone’s special day.