Early in her career, Jane Roach traveled with a camera bag heavy enough to leave shoulder marks by the end of a single afternoon: five lenses, two bodies, a bag of filters for situations that came up maybe once a year. Years of both destination travel and demanding wedding days have trimmed that kit down to exactly three lenses that cover nearly every situation worth photographing. Here's what stayed, what got cut, and why.
The Standard Zoom: The Lens That Does the Talking
A mid-range zoom, roughly 24-70mm on a full-frame body, handles the overwhelming majority of both travel and wedding work. It's wide enough for environmental portraits and interior shots, long enough for a tighter portrait without stepping uncomfortably close, and versatile enough to avoid a lens change during fast-moving moments like a ceremony processional or a crowded market street.
This lens lives on the camera for probably 70 percent of any given shoot. During a wedding, it covers everything from the ceremony to candid reception moments. While traveling, it's the lens reached for walking through an unfamiliar city, when the next interesting frame could be a wide street scene or a tight detail shot with no warning which one it'll be.
The Fast Prime: For When Light Runs Out
A fast 35mm or 50mm prime, typically around f/1.4, earns its spot in the bag for one primary reason: low light. Receptions after sunset, dim market interiors, a candlelit dinner during a travel trip, these are situations where a zoom's smaller maximum aperture simply can't gather enough light without pushing ISO to a noisy extreme.
Beyond low light, this lens also produces a rendering the standard zoom can't quite match: a softer background blur, a more intimate feel for close portraits, and a slightly different color and contrast character that adds variety to a final gallery. A few specific moments where this lens gets reached for:
Reception dancing once the venue lights dim and string lights become the main light source
Quiet, candid portraits where a shallow depth of field isolates a subject from a busy background
Any interior travel scene, a riad courtyard, a covered market, where light is limited and a tripod isn't practical
The Telephoto: For Distance and Compression
A 70-200mm telephoto rounds out the travel photography lens kit, covering situations where getting physically closer isn't possible or would ruin the moment. During a wedding, this is the lens for the ceremony itself, capturing genuine expressions from a respectful distance rather than crowding the altar. While traveling, it's essential for wildlife, distant landscape details, and candid street photography where closing the physical distance would change how a subject behaves in front of the camera.
This lens also does something neither of the other two can: visual compression, the way a telephoto flattens the distance between foreground and background elements. That effect is particularly useful for landscape work, stacking layers of a mountain range or making a distant subject feel more connected to their surroundings than a wider lens would show.
What Got Left Behind, and Why
Trimming a kit down means making real decisions about what doesn't earn its weight. A few things that used to travel in every bag, and the reasoning for cutting them:
A dedicated macro lens. Beautiful for close-up detail work, but the standard zoom's close-focus capability handles ring shots and small details well enough that a specialized macro rarely justified its weight.
A second camera body as backup. Now carried only for wedding days, where a mid-day equipment failure isn't an option, but left home for personal travel where the stakes of a single malfunction are lower.
A full filter kit. Down to a single circular polarizer, which handles the vast majority of situations where a filter actually makes a visible difference, mainly cutting glare on water and foliage.
How This Kit Adapts to the Job
For wedding days, all three lenses come along, with the standard zoom and telephoto seeing the most use and the fast prime reserved mainly for reception low light. For personal travel, the same three lenses cover nearly every scenario, though the balance shifts: the fast prime gets used more often for street and interior work, while the telephoto comes out primarily for landscapes and wildlife.
The real lesson from years of narrowing this kit down isn't about these three specific lenses. It's that a smaller, well-chosen kit gets used more confidently and more often than an exhaustive one that mostly stays zipped in a bag. Fewer choices in the field means more attention on the actual moment in front of the lens.
If you're curious about the gear behind your own wedding or portrait session, or just want to talk cameras, Jane Roach is always happy to nerd out about lenses during a consultation.
Photo: John Brighenti (CC BY 2.0)
