How I provide environmentally friendly wedding photography – part 2

Welcome to part 2 of 3 in my series about what I do to help make your wedding or handfasting photography environmentally friendly.

In part 1 I talked about why I photograph purely digital and never on film, and how it helps reduce the environmental impact of my business and your wedding.
I also spoke about why being a sustainable wedding supplier, beyond the popular buying carbon offset tokens and re-using my water bottle, are so important to me.
It basically comes down to what I learnt growing up in a farming village, seeing the impact of human activity on nature, wildlife and other people and their farms.
If you missed it, you can find it here. 

Today I will speak about what else I do in my business, that will help keeping your wedding photos as environmentally friendly as we can.

Minimising the environmental impact of your wedding photography

Apart form shooting fully in digital to reduce my net use of plastic and chemicals, and protect clean water, I also take the following steps:

Use of batteries in my environmentally friendly wedding photography and beyond

One thing I need lots of is battery power.
The cameras need it, the flashes need it, the laptop needs it, the phone… and apart from toxic chemicals, batteries also require a number of raw materials that need to be mined.

Therefore, all batteries I use are rechargeable. Yes, all! Even the ones is my TV remote.
Using rechargeable batteries makes your wedding photography more environmentally friendly by reducing chemicals to dispose off and the need for newly mined raw materials.

I know you will be interested in the electricity used to recharge all those batteries and the CO2 impact of it?

Powering my wedding business with renewable energy

For a few years now, I have produced some of my own electricity through solar cells. It’s not enough to cover us 24-7, but it goes some way towards our usage.
For the times when there isn’t enough sun, I buy from a supplier who specialises in renewable electricity generation.
It is more expensive than the big suppliers, but at least I am reducing the amount of gas that gets burned (and CO2 that gets released as a result of it) in my and my clients’ names.

Even though the CO2 footprint of my electricity is much lower than that of electricity produced by burning gas, I also actively try to save on electricity I use. I run energy efficient light bulbs, don’t overfill the kettle, make sure any new appliances I buy are energy efficient, and generally switch off when they are not needed.
Because if I don’t use more of the renewable energy than I really need, then there is more left in the grid for others to use. And less gas and coal will need to be burned to supply every household.

While we are talking about keeping our carbon footprint small…

The hidden CO2 footprint of digital storage

We really need to talk about digital storage!
Even though I do not have boxes and boxes of plastic film, I need lots of digital storage.

While digital storage might take up a lot less room and resources physically, and hard drives being (almost) infinitely reusable, the servers of the cloud don’t run on love and light.

Well, they might be running on daylight if there are solar cells… but that’s beyond the point. Cloud storage requires electricity around the clock. Meaning every single photo has an energy footprint. And the longer it’s in the cloud, the bigger that footprint gets.

For this reason, I delete all false shots right away.
False shots are photos where the camera misfired, I accidentally pressed the shutter when grabbing the camera, the flash didn’t go off… the sort of photo that has nothing really on it.

Then there are RAW files. These are the digital equivalent of a negatives. And their file size is huge. Like 20 times that of the finished high resolution jpeg file you will receive.

Once I have edited your gallery, I don’t need the RAW files anymore. So as soon as I have delivered your gallery to you, I delete the RAW files from the cloud. This minimises the amount of storage and in turn energy that is needed to store your photos.

I do keep the fully edited gallery for a little while, of course, but probably not as long as you will want to look at them. So please make a backup copy on a separate computer, flash drive or your own cloud storage right away.

Apart from energy, I need quite a few pieces of equipment to capture you beautiful wedding. And each item has its own environmental footprint. So here is what I do to keep it small.

Buying equipment – with a conscience!

Replacing items of equipment has an environmental impact, so I aim to buy the right equipment for the job, and make sure it remains reliable ang lasts.

I aim to buy equipment only once and buy the right one straight away. SO whenever I need to buy a new piece of equipment, I ask other photographers for their experiences.
While general reviews are helpful, nothing helps find a product that can function and withstand the pressures of professional use like hearing from other professional wedding photographers.

I aim to buy high quality products that need replacing less often, and produce less waste this way.
Sustainable production methods, fair wages and responsible treatment of workers are also an important factor that I consider when narrowing down my selection.

Once I own a piece of equipment and use it, it is serviced regularly. This not only helps to make it more reliable, it also extends the lifespan and saves unnecessary waste, energy and materials needed to produce a replacement.

However, every item of equipment is only reliable for a certain amount of time. When critical items of equipment come to the end of their reliable life span, I replace them.
I always carry at least two cameras, but your wedding is to important to risk equipment failure in a crucial moment that we might not be able to recreate.

Any equipment that is still in good working order when I retire it, gets a new life in the realm of personal and/or hobby photography.
Incidentally, this is exactly how I ended up with my first professional-quality digital camera. I’m just paying it forward.

Responsible web hosting

Responsible web hosting really is a thing.

I could go out there and buy the cheapest hosting, but remember what I said about cloud storage? The same applies to web hosting.

My website sits on a server that eats electricity 24h a day. It has to, because you would not be able to access my website when the server powers down. And closing shops at 6pm really isn’t a thing anymore, especially online.

This is why I am hosting with a smaller, UK based hosting company, who plant trees every time I renew my contract and donate part of their profits to charities supporting disadvantaged children.
They also provide a great service to me, which of course helps make the decision to stay with them easy!

The big steps to provide environmentally friendly wedding photography

Together with the other two parts of this blog, the above make up the the big and (mostly) obvious steps I take to be as sustainable a wedding business as I can be and to provide you with environmentally friendly wedding photography.

Want to read the other blogs? Find them here!

However, there is a lot more I do to be an environmentally friendly wedding photographer. I will talk about it in the third and final part of my blog next week.

Follow me on social media to see when I post a new blog. Links in the footer of this website.

Bright blessings,

Handfasting And Pagan Wedding Photographer UK and EU