Simple Things

October 28, 2007 | Category: Photographers

As are all busy photographers, I’m always looking for ways to improve my efficiency. For the most part, this means looking at new software or hardware to speed up the processing of my photos (batch rotating and shrinking them down) so I can get the photo discs to the models faster… or specialized plug-ins for photo-shop to automate certain things when I do touch up work so I don’t have to waste time doing certain things manually.

But I was forgetting about some fairly obvious things…

1. Buy Extra Batteries -  This is a no-brainer. I’ve always had two batteries for my Canon DSLR (Rebel XT) because I use a hand-grip (which requires two batteries) and I can generally take about 1500 photos before I need to recharge them. I always considered that more than enough for a days shoot… but one of my batteries failed to charge on a day that I had a long shoot with two models and technical glitch forced me to take periodic breaks to charge up the remaining battery. And even if both batteries worked flawlessly, it was still a day that I shot nearly 2,000 photos. And what about those days when I’m shooting models back to back and have no time to recharge? So now I have two sets of two batteries on hand and no longer have to worry about running out of power at a critical time. This leads nicely into…

2. Buy An Extra Charger – The charger for my battery will fully charge an empty battery in about an hour… so with two sets of batteries, I’d have to spend 4 hours charging up before a shoot instead of the usual 2. With two chargers, I can always have a set charging up while I’m shooting… or an extra charged set when I’m out and about. It sounds like an obvious and mundane thing… but it will make your life easier. It’s too bad I can’t find a dual charger for my particular kind of batteries.

3. Buy the biggest memory card or stick you can afford. The price of memory is coming down all the time, so there’s no reason not to go big. I recently upgraded to an 8 gig card which means no more having to stop in the middle of a shoot, swap out my 2 gig card for another 2 gig card and go back to what I was doing before. Stopping to unload photos is a good way to ruin the mood and momentum of your shoot.

I often shoot a mix of RAW and jpeg so those 2 gig cards fill up more quickly than I imagined they would when I bought them. With an 8 gig card, I’d have to shoot nearly 1000 raw photos or nearly 3000 jpegs at highest resolution before I run out of room. The only drawback is the counter on my card only goes up to 999… but it’s a good problem to have. The 2 gigabyte cards will be used for my non-model shoots so I don’t have to worry about mixing model and non-model shots. I shoot a LOT of nude work and wouldn’t want accidentally “flash” someone if I take my camera to my day job or to a wedding shoot :)

4. If you have the option to buy a hand-grip for your camera, I encourage you to get one. Not only will it make your camera look more professional, but you’ll have more battery power and a safer hand-hold on your equipment… especially if you have bigger hands like I do. It’s just easier and more comfortable to shoot for a long time. Plus, if you’re using a heavier zoom lens, the camera will be better balanced and your work is sure to benefit from that. I bought one about a year ago and it NEVER comes off. I would consider my camera incomplete without it.

3 Comments

  1. cliff84
    on October 29th, 2007
    1

    I went on my first larger paid shoot late last week and wish I hadn’t overlooked the things you had mentioned. By the end of the second day I was critically low on memory and battery power became a problem where the battery for the second camera was recharging through most of the event which left me shooting with my older camera that just doesn’t have that great of a dynamic range. I’m buying a Canon 40D at the end of the month and the battery grip will be part of that purchase, along with the extra batteries and charger. As far as software, I’ve been working far more of late in Adobe Lightroom as opposed to Photoshop. It’s saved me a ton of time in post-processing given that I have to balance a day job with my habit.

  2. Trianglehead
    on October 29th, 2007
    2

    I’m lucky, my day job is as a computer programmer, so I’ve been able to write a lot of my own tools to stream-line the post-production. Beyond that, I also have two batteries that I swap out, an 8 Gig card, but I’ve never gone in for the battery grip.

    I’m curious, as much as you shoot, how do you handle archiving and data integrety to maintain all those images?

  3. machine
    on October 29th, 2007
    3

    Cliff84 – I was lucky and the models wanted to take frequent smoking breaks anyway so we still managed to get everything we wanted from the shoot. You’ll love the hand-grip… it makes shooting portrait work so much easier as it puts an extra set of controls on the side of your camera

    Trianglehead – You’re fortunate in being able to build you own tools… I’m going to review a new piece of useful software for the Mac that I’ve been using lately that makes my life much easier.

    As for backups… I always backup a copy of the whole shoot unretouched to an external hard drive and burn another copy on a DVD (or two)before I even start to do anything with the photos. I figure that making two backups will lessen the chance of totally losing something. And I also back up the finished work that way. I’m considering online back-up approaches but with my slow upload sleep… it’s not worth it.