What’s in Your Bag, Alexis Cuarezma?

Photos © Alexis Cuarezma

As a portrait photographer who loves light, I always take a lot of lighting gear on my location shoots. My go-to strobes are battery-powered, which saves me a lot of time and eliminates the hassle of having to run extension cords everywhere.

All my lights are kept in Lightware cases, and my main camera bag is the Think Tank Airport International V2.0; it stores all my cameras and lenses. My memory cards are always with me in my memory card wallet. I also keep a spare 4GB SanDisk SD card on my key chain (just in case I forget to bring cards to a shoot).

I take my laptop backpack everywhere—it contains my iPad, laptop, external HDs for backup and my memory card readers. I love using iUSBportCAMERA 2 to wirelessly tether my camera to my iPad, preview my images and show my clients what I’m shooting. However, the most important thing that I take with me is at least one assistant (shown above) to help carry everything.

The Gear Bag
• Two B1 Monolights, plus two spare batteries and chargers
• Two Pro-B4 packs, plus two spare batteries and chargers
• Three heads for B4 Packs
• Narrow Beam Reflectors x3
• Snoot
• Grid set (5 to 40 degrees)
• White beauty dish w/ sock
• Profoto Speed Ring (for Chimera Softbox)
• Hardbox w/ barn doors
• Profoto Air Remote
• 30×40 Chimera Softbox
• Two umbrellas
• Four PocketWizard MultiMAX
• Two PocketWizard Plus
• An awesome assistant or more (bayphotoassistant.com)
• CTS/CTO full and 1/4
• Gaffer tape
• Bungee cords
• Canon 1D X
• Canon 5D Mark II
• Canon 1D Mark IV
• Four 64GB SanDisk cards
• Canon 16-35mm II
• Canon 24-70mm
• Canon 70-200mm II
• Canon 100-400mm II
• Canon 580EX
• Canon 420EX II
• iUSBportCAMERA 2
• iPad 4
• Laptop and external HD
• Two CF card readers

Alexis Cuarezma, whose credits include shoots for Sports Illustrated and The Ring Magazine, is a San Francisco-based photographer who excels at both on-location and in-studio portraiture, be it of a famous boxer, Olympic swimmer, college football quarterback or World Cup superstar. An alumnus of the Eddie Adams workshop in upstate New York (Brainstorm XXIV), Cuarezma has done assignments for the L.A. Times, The New York Times, HBO and a number of international publications.