So, I survived spending 2 days on my feet taking photos of everyone (or at least, trying to) at Supanova. I learnt a few valuable lessons from it all:
- Always carry spare batteries. Nothing’s worse than reaching the last hour or two of the day and realising that your flash batteries are dead, and then having your camera battery fail on you only moments later.
- Flash Exposure Bracketing is almost compulsory for low-interference shoots, it lets you take the photo(s) and move on without holding up people for very long, and gives you a range of flash exposures to choose from in the event that your flash autoexposure system is doing stupid stuff. (I found the 50D couldn’t always get the exposure level right under Supanova main hall conditions, and the 400D was hopeless). It also results in the worse blinking photos however – warn the subjects first.
- Always confirm camera and flash settings when returning to the floor. Trying to shoot and discovering that you’ve left 2s self-timer on from the ultra-slow exposures you were doing moments before is a little embarrassing.
- Fast lenses are good. Convention lighting generally sucks.
- Carry one flash per body. Don’t try to share – you’ll just spend all your time fidgeting to move it between bodies.
- Don’t try to manually focus without a manual focus optimised focusing screen when physically exhausted. It might look right to you, but it probably isn’t.
- 50mm is too long on an APS-C body for the tight quarters shooting at Supanova, but should be about right on full-frame.
- People seem to assume that the grip fitted camera and large flash means you’re a professional…
Geez – I’ve been throwing too much money at photographic kit again. :)
I’ve picked up an EOS400 body as a backup/secondary body with it’s kit EF-S 18-55 f/3.5-5.6, a cheap EF 80-200 f/4.5-5.6 USM (cheap, slow – in both senses of the word – zoom, but functional), a battery grip for the 50D, Speedlite 580EX II and a 250GB memorykick unit. I’ve worked out that I can probably shoot about 9000-12000 RAWs before I run out of storage now. Yes, the flash will most likely melt down first.
Adapting to ETTL shooting has been a little interesting – given that my last experience with flashes was all manual 10 years ago, being able to let the flash handle power adjustment and set up the shot as I want it is pretty damned uncanny. No more guide-tables to manually calculate aperture given a distance and film-speed.
I’ve also given up on neck-straps for now and ripped them off of my bodies – whilst I like the safety net of having it wrapped around my wrist when I shoot, I dont’ like having the damn thing dangling down in face half the time. Will probably revert this on the 400D so I can sling it, but I’m not missing it on the 50D, that’s for certain.
Still waiting to hear back if I’ve got a volunteer shooting gig this weekend. If I do get it, expect lots of shiny in my flickr come next week. There will easily be a few thousand photos shot, so I’m sure I’ll be able to find something to post.
Next stop for my kit purchasing: lighting stands, umbrellas, a second 580, wireless transmitter… and probably a WiFi grip.
So, I finally splurged and bought a new digital camera – a Canon EOS 50D. Some of the initial results are visible on my Flickr.
All I need now are some decent lenses.
