So while sitting around yesterday trying to work from home, aching and dealing with my swollen face, I considered the sort of kit I would need to take quality wedding/portraiture photos.

It occurred to me that if I had 10 grand kicking around, I could put together an amazing kit for doing wedding photography and portrait work.  In a moment of idle dreaming I listed it out on Amazon using their "Listmania" service.  You can see it in great detail here. I don't see how I could come up with that kind of dough unless I sold off my collection of Magic: the Gathering trading cards.  It probably wouldn't get me all the way there, but it might get me far enough along to build a useful subset of the gear.

A serious wedding photographer brings a spare camera body on a job--both because the primary camera could break down, and also because it can make switching between lenses much quicker, so I would want a more serious body to be my primary camera and my XTi would be my backup body.  Then I would need a couple high quality zoom lenses and a flash for the new camera.  That would be the basic wedding kit.

In order to do serious portraiture these lenses plus those I already own would probably suffice, but there is a little more equipment I would need for portraiture, and there is at least one additional lens that would be nice to have for the wedding work, and some flash enhancements that would be good for both:

The 16-35 lens gives me serious wide angle capability for large family shots (not unusual for weddings) and I can use it for landscape work when I am shooting for pleasure.  The muslin backdrop, support system, and clamps would be necessary for decent portrait shots, and ultimately I would probably want a few varieties of muslin backdrop, but for starting out, basic black would be fine.  The OC-E3 would allow me to separate the flash from the camera and hold it overhead or mount it nearby, and the LightSphere would let me diffuse the flash for softer lighting.  Stage two brings the total pricetag to $7,720.  This would be a solid wedding/portrait kit.

The only thing lacking is an even longer lens for very special sorts of situations, and a quality backup lens for the XTi body if I am ever shooting with an assistant and we both need to be in the most common shooting range (20's-70's) at the same time.  That's where stage three comes in:

The 400mm L glass with image stabilization should provide the last conceivable bit of reach necessary for weddings and I suspect for most weddings it wouldn't be necessary.  However it would be a solid lens for wildlife when I am not shooting weddings.  The 28-75mm Tamron gets a lot of respect despite the brand and the price, and as a backup lens on the XTi body, that would be fine.  This brings the total pricetag to $9,509 and gives me enough glass to do almost anything I want.  Yes, there's no extreme length lenses (> 400 mm) but I can't conceive of a use for such lenses that could justify the expense.

The glass listed would cover me for macro, wildlife, weddings, landscape, low light, sports, and portraits (especially when you include the 28mm, 50mm, and 90mm primes I already own).  Looking toward specialty landscape and architectural photography, the only other thing I can think of that would be "nice to have" would be a fisheye lens and a perspective-correcting lens.  That would be the "bonus stage":

The fisheye lens lets you squeeze a lot of lanscape into a single shot by giving the shot a spherized look... here's an example taken with the EF 15mm fisheye.  A tilt-shift lens is a strictly manual focus lens that allows you shift the focal plane in order to correct the perspective and distortion that often results from shooting tall structures from relatively nearby with short focal length lenses.  Here's a sample shot with the TS-E 24mm.  Anyway this would put the pricetag at $11,188, but what a killer kit this would be!!  Ah well... if I win the lottery someday... fun to think about I suppose.

If I sell off my MTG collection and save up my pennies for awhile, the basic wedding kit becomes a distinct possibility. I'll be devoting some serious thought to that over the coming days.