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Hae-Yu
02-28-2007, 12:02 PM
1: Compressed air. This is a godsend. Grab a can and pack it in your bag. It works much better than any lint-free cloth (where does all that lint you wipe off go?!!) or stupid q-tips.

2: Make every shot count. Limit your memory. Say 20 pictures to a given site. I used to take hundreds and hundreds of photos and bracket them 3 exposures for every shot. Deleting mediocre shots is difficult later because you think "maybe a crop or a photoshop will turn this into perfection." Trust me, you will rarely get around to it.

I started with 6 GB for a 4-day trip. The 1st 2 days I went through @ 4.75GB. That's about 900 pics. As I realized my predicament, I spent the night deleting the obvious bad shots and freed up just under a gig spread across 10 cards: 20 open shots here, 3 there...

This forced me to shoot on a limitation. On the 3rd, day, I planned a specific maximum of pics I would take at each site. I stopped shooting brackets and started deleting pictures. I used the histogram and zoomed more. I shot (and kept) just over 100 pictures and on day four I shot maybe 90 pictures. Overall, the pictures were far higher quality. There are no fuzzy pictures or any over/ under-exposed shots. There are no "maybes." I had to exercise skills to compose the shot the first time.

3: If you have an Olympus, Panasonic, or Fuji don't use XD cards. They are much slower than Compact Flash. I didn't shoot any RAWS because XD read/ writes are slow.

Hae-Yu
02-28-2007, 01:00 PM
4: Most of our days were hazy. We noticed that looking through tinted windows presented clearer views than looking at them outside. I used a medium ND filter most of the time which seemed to cut through some of the haze.

Sammie
02-28-2007, 03:07 PM
Cant wait to see the pics

I also made the mistake of taking up too much memory on my last trip. I was taking Jpeg Fine+Raw and ate up 6 gigs of memory in a 4 hour shoot.

Luckily I had brought my laptop with me and was able to download the images and erase the images on the cards that evening, but the next day I dropped the Jpegs and just went raw.
I didnt do any bracket shots but shooting in raw allowed me more forgiveness in post processing with not so perfect exposure and white balances.

I agree about not taking so many shots. I've been working on about 900 images from my last trip for the past two weeks. Its getting tiresome.
I need a better work flow or maybe I'll just pick up speed with experience.