Do you download at weddings??

[JoeMikos]

I can easily shoot 3-4,000 myself. I often have an assistant with me but the first few jobs this season i'm shooting alone. Hence my dilema about how/when to dump the cards. I just won't have enough cards to get through the whole day. I shoot a ton during the dancing at the reception. (lot's of reprint sales)

I think i'm goping to shoot a mixture of raw and jpeg. Raw for when it's really moving fast and jpeg for the late night dancing.

It'll be interesting shooting with this bazooka. Last season I shot with the fuji s2. (1-2MB jpegs per shot)

Joe

[Mike_Guilbault]

I don't download at weddings - not enough time for that and the expense doesn't justify it. You simply have to be careful with your CF cards. I have a belt pouch that holds my cards, I cycle through them, keeping them in strict order (turning the used ones backwards so I know they're full) and being very careful when changing them. Come-on guys... remember film?!! If a roll of film was lost, or dropped and unravelled, it was gone! There were no backups. We were just more careful then. Digital has made many of us (and I'm including me in this) sloppy. After the wedding I download and burn to CD because HD's are not as reliable as people sometimes think they are.. but that's a bonus!! If you follow a strict procedure you shouldn't have any problems simply using CF cards. Personally, I'll take the extra money to purchase a laptop or 'digital wallet' and use it on a vacation with my wife! Isn't that what it's all about?

[David_A_Smith]

I just came back from doing a 3 day shoot away from home. I took just under 20Gb of images. AS I don't have a burner in my laptop and taking a desktop system would have been impractical, I would have needed 20Gb of cards to cover me on this shoot which I also think is pretty impractical particularly from a cost stand point. I realise people are going to be quite adamant about how they handle their images and I'm not trying to win an argument here, but I will just say that again my little pocket storage device was very handy and performed flawlessly.

Of particular interest was a mishap I had...
I left a sandisk ultra card in a pair of shorts which my wife not only washed but put in the clothes dryer as well. It was only when she hit something in the pocket when she went to iron them the card was discovered. I was able to read everything on the card perfectly and it seems to have suffered no ill effects.

Now I can hear all the Pro-card guys saying " see, you couldn't do that with a pocket drive" which is true enough. I'd just have to say there isn't much chance I'd ever leave something as big and heavy as a drive in my pocket either [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[JoeMikos]

what pocket drive do you use? Did it take awhile for you to get over the fear of downoading to the card and reformatting?

Joe

[David_A_Smith]

joe,
I have a Mindstor drive which I believe are no longer made due to the company going out of business. It was given to me by a friend who didn't use it much. As I started pretty early in digital I have always downloaded my images on the job in order to use the cards again. Before the mindstor the images were downloaded to a laptop.
I have never lost any images, however after reading this thread I became a bit nervous on my last trip and set up my laptop to automatically back up eveything in the mindstor when I connected them at night. Thankfully I had no problems.

The mindstor does have a verification check at the end of each download and tells you if there is any errors. These are always caused by the batteries going flat in the middle of the dump after too much use but I have now made myself an external power supply that will allow more images to be saved than what I could shoot in a couple of days [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

As I am planning on a new higher res camera this year, I will probably invest in a 1 gig card and another pocket type drive to back up to in the case of important work like weddings etc.
So far for me I have never lost an image off a drive but have had 2 card failures. Backing up all important work is the safest policy however.