Just re-subscribed after a 13 Day photo shoot of Dance. The Dance was an Eisteddfod of dance with a mix of Ballet, tap, jazz, cultural, contemporary and others. My job was to capture each act digitally for sale during the Eisteddfod.
Equipment 2 x *istD 1 x 70-200mm 2.8 Tamaron AF 1 x 50mm 1.4 Pentax AF Store full of rechargable batteries 6 x 512 CF Cards 1 X iBook 1 x Server with 250 gig external drive 2 x terminals for public veiwing. On setting up our computer network we discovered the wireless connection would not work in the theatre, so we had to get some cat5 cable and run this from the laptop to the server, about 80 meters. The set up was that I would take the photo's in the theatre and download the CF cards down to the server in the foyer. This worked well. This was the day before the Day 1. Day 1. We were not given any time to test the lighting and so the first photo was yellow as the auto WB could not cope with the tungsten lights. A quick switch to tungsten manually fixed this and the photos looked good. At 2.8 I was able to shoot at 1/350 but after a word with the lighting techs we were able to shoot 1600 ISO, 2.8, 1/750. This was great and we were off and running. Day 2. CF card crashed but we were able to regain all the data exept 4 files that were corrupt. Later, it happened again and I formatted all the cards and made sure fully charged batteries were used for each session, 3 per day, and that the CF cards were formatted for each session. There were no more CF card problems after this. Day 3. The *istD locked up. I turned it on, off, shook it, yelled at it but no response. I removed the batteries and put them back in and away it went again with no problem until about an hour later when it happened again. Same remedy to fix it. This was not good, so I switched to the back-up body and it lasted well for the rest of the days till the end. The network worked like a charm and the customers could order thier prints after viewing them on the terminals in foyer. The *istD that failed is now in the hands of C.R.Kennedy for repair. The other body is still functioning normally. In all over 45,000 photos during the 13 days. The days were 12-15 hours long and it is good to be back home with the family. I am sorry I cannot provide samples as it is part of the contract not to put any of the images on the net, some of the childrens sessions are very young and in very small costumes. In all, a successful and profitable trip. Does this make the *istD a 'Pro' level camera? Kind regards Kevin -- "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."
