Weddings in

Fashion

According to Brett Florens, a good wedding photographer combines photojournalism, portraits, fashion and food, all into a single shoot. He needs his gear to be as flexible and multi-faceted as he is if he’s going to get the shots his clients are counting on.

Internationally acclaimed photographer Brett Florens has gone from documenting the worst day in a person’s life to photographing their best. The fact that he’s a photographer at all is something of a surprise. The result of political upheaval in his native South Africa, Florens’ career in photography came quite unexpectedly.

Fulfilling his national service obligation, Florens was given a camera, six weeks of training and charged with documenting violent and politically motivated crimes — many of them murders. While the subject matter was appalling, he found he had a gift for creating images. Then, some of his fellow officers asked him to photograph their weddings. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Florens loved the creativity he found in wedding photography but wasn’t inspired by what he saw other wedding photographers doing. What appealed to him was the style and use of light he found in fashion photography. So he studied Vogue, Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar. He followed fashion trends from the runways in Paris and Milan. And he applied it to his work, creating a unique style, and images that could easily appear in the pages of the magazines he read.

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Brett's Gear

Vertex 200 AW & Flipside 400 AW

"The Vertex 200 AW is perfectly sized to carry all the gear I need for a full day wedding shoot. The laptop compartment is the ideal size for a collapsible reflector and the over-all size of the bag is great for traveling. It fits into the overhead locker perfectly for domestic as well as international flights. I use the flaps on the top of the bag for passports and travel documents. The internal pouch that is located in the middle of the "lid" holds and protects my Epson P7000.

If I know that I am going to be shooting on the beach or sandy conditions I will use the Flipside 400 AW purely to save the back of my shirt! The fact that I can put it down "face first" onto the sand and still have easy access to my kit means that I don't get a dirty or dusty back. It is also great for traveling in less than safe conditions, it is well known that gear does get stolen on trips and the flipside does reduce that risk."

Brett Florens