Pleasure with 1DsMKII at today's shoot.

[Longwatcher]

I suppose this might also be applicable under talking about photography, but I am just putting it here because it is just trivia chatting to me.

Just finished shooting (still archiving) today's shoot.
Two very nice looking models (one full nude, the other implied nude only. The best part they clicked. Very hot. I only had one of the two for 4 hours, but the other was for 9 hours (although there was a long break for makeup change - very long).
First full session with my 1DsMkII (as in not for portfolio, not TFP/CD, for money hopefully)
I like having 1DsMkII with Sandisk Ultra II and Extreme III cards and faster card readers. I also like having assistants. I only hit the buffer limit twice and only had to wait for a card to write to computer twice and both for very short times [okay technically there was a thrid time that took forever, but that was me being stupid and using my old Sandisk card for about 12 shots - I don't count that one]

I forgot to pay attention to the combined total but it was 1491 images when the first model had to go and I got at least half that amount in the second half. I do know the total space for the jpegs was 4.02GB. Since I shot RAW with M2 jpeg at compression 8, I think you will understand when I say, I ran out of space temporarily on my primary 250GB drive and had to move a couple of about 15GB folders out of the way to make room. I am currently writing my 4th DVD for the archive copy with several more to go.

The fact that I could take that many pictures in that amount of time, just impresses the heck out of me. And at least from the preliminary look which we did, while waiting for makeup change, it looks like very few bad ones were caused by camera problems (about 1 out of 100 were slightly out of focus) as oppossed to my 10D which usually ended up being 1 out of 10 bad, with large batches of bad if I didn't pay attention.

Overall very very happy with performance of camera.

Almost forgot the part that surprised me the most. I was on battery power and still have not changed the battery once since this morning, so all of those shots and one battery charge. No that is cool compared to me 10D. And it is still not showing a lower level yet.

It will be at least a few days before I post any images to the web and only a couple of them. The rest are going to a friend's pay-per-view I hope.

Just thought I would share.

[CyberDyneSystems]

Glad to hear the beast is working out well.. :)

Man that is a lot of images! 9 Hours! What a marathon.

The battery life on these things is amazing indeed...

[Moppie]

Wow, how on earth do you sort through 3,000 images?

[Longwatcher]

And the total is now in 2,557 images taken. 9 DVDs used for archive.

The way I go through that many images is (at least at this time) I put all of the jpegs in one folder and then use a windows XP thumbnail viewer/picture window to go through and get a general idea of which ones worked and which ones didn't.

Some sequences, like a set where one of the models had on a mask didn't work I figure I won't use. Although out of a couple hundred of that set there are a few good ones even still. One of the outfits just did not look good on that particular model. In another set, when model a was on the right it did not look as good as her on the left.

Get rid of all of the bad ones like those and there went about 700-1000 images. As I am going through, I will also note down any exceptional shots for later working.

After the initial look (and I am only about 600 images through it so far), I will go into DPP and fix the white balance, saturation and contrast for each setting; crop and then save selected shots as jpegs into a separate "collection" folder. Finally I will recheck all of those in the separate folder for any blatant things I don't like. Then I create a CD and give to a friend of mine and see if the set (or sets) have any potential.

Meanwhile, I will go back to the list of exceptional ones save those as TIFs, bring them into PS CS and fix all blemishes and other annoying things in the picture and then save back out as TIF and a jpeg of each into a separate "edited" folder.

When done I create a CD (or DVD) of the edited TIFs and a jpeg version of those. If my friend likes the set, then I also make a CD (or DVD) copy of the "collection" for myself for copyright purposes.

Then I am done. I expect for this set it should take about 2 weeks to go through all of the images and another week for any edits. That is why I tend to only do one to two shoots per month like this.

Last thing I do is verify I have both a good Archive copy and a good edited copy of all files and then off my hard drive the shoot goes. If I still need to hang on to the set for awhile it goes on my external drive for longer periods.

Just the way I do things right now as it seems to be working for me.

[Moppie]

Cool, thank you very much.
I expected it to take 2-3 days, not 2-3 weeks.

[Longwatcher]

Cool, thank you very much.
I expected it to take 2-3 days, not 2-3 weeks.

I unfortunately have a day job requireing 8 hours M-F. But I can only stare at the screen for so long before I
A: start hateing almost every shot
or
B: Not paying attention to bad things in the shot.

So about 2-3 hours at a time. On weekends I can get in two to three sets of 2-3 hours. On weeknights I get in 1-2 hours on two or three nights. After the initial cut, it takes about an hour to do 20-30 images (or about 2 to 3 min per image) and that is before the editing stage which works out to 30 minutes per image on average, so I try to limit those.