Photography Weekend Part 2 - Taking Photos

See previous post: Photography Weekend Part 1 - Packing My Gear.

I apologize for not getting this post out sooner; the first weekend of Steubenville St. Louis went by so quickly that I simply didn't have time to write more about my process over the weekend.

In this entry, I'm going to speak a little bit about the gear I use while I'm out getting pictures. Note that this setup is what I'd typically use when doing photojournalism-style event photography—not what I'd necessarily have when doing studio shoots, portraits, etc. (more controlled environments).

Camera Bodies and Lenses: Since the Steubenville conference is primarily held in a few very large venues, where I can't easily get within 10-20' of the people I'm shooting, I typically leave a long zoom on my main camera (in this case, the Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 VR), and have a medium zoom on my secondary camera. For this event, though, since I didn't use wide angles too often, I forewent the second body and strapped my Nikon 17-55mm f/2.8 DX lens on my belt with a medium-size Adorama Slinger bag (black bag on the right side of the picture).

Vertical Battery Grip: Almost every time I shoot for more than a few minutes, I put a Neweer Vertical Battery Grip on my D7000, so I can switch between portrait and landscape effortlessly, and not have my arms flailing about, thus drawing attention to myself. I used to use the Nikon grip, but sold it after finding the 5x cheaper Neweer model works just peachy for my needs.

I set the Eye-Fi to only upload photos that were 'protected' (if I wanted to upload a photo, I would hit the 'lock' button while previewing the photo, and I set up the Flickr login for stlyouth's account on my computer. I also had to use a private network I set up through my iPhone's MyWi app (my iPhone is jailbroken), and I set up a connection to that network while the card was plugged into my computer.

During shooting, the first 10-20 minutes of uploads usually went pretty quickly, but after that, I often had to cycle the D7000's power, then sometimes also toggle the WiFi network on my phone. With MyWi on my phone, I could see exactly when photos were being uploaded, and it was odd that sometimes the Eye-Fi would wait for a power cycle to start uploading more photos. Eventually, though, all the photos would be uploaded. Not quite real-time, and each 2-4MB file took about 10 seconds to upload, but it was pretty awesome to not have to run back and forth between my computer and the venues to dump off pictures.

Overall: I worked with two new pieces of gear this event: the shoulder strap and the Eye-Fi. Both had some very positive benefits, but both also caused a slight amount of grief. That's the way things are, though. My back is still hurting after the event, but my neck and shoulders feel so much better due to the new shoulder strap. And my stress level this year was much lower, since the Eye-Fi saved frequent trips to my computer to dump pictures off the camera manually.