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Shooting at the Anaheim House of Blues with the Professional UDMA 300x card
By Alan Hess
On June 1st 2007, I had the pleasure of shooting Citizen Cope at the Anaheim House of Blues. One of the things that was different about this shoot was the
card in my Nikon D2X. I was using one of the new Lexar Professional UDMA 8GB CompactFlash cards.
This new card offers a higher transfer speed between the card and computer than ever before. When I am shooting in a dark, crowded, smoky environment, the
one thing that I don't like doing is changing my CompactFlash cards. That's where the 8GB Professional card comes in handy. The 8GB capacity gives me
approximately 400 raw photos on the Nikon D2X, which is plenty of capacity for a shoot. I trust the Lexar Professional cards, and I have no problem with
putting as many photos as possible onto a single high-capacity card.
After all the House of Blues paperwork was filled out, I was given not only a photo pass, but an all-access pass as well. This gave me the ability to continue
shooting after the first three songs, which is traditionally all I am allowed to shoot with a photo pass.
Alice Smith opened the show with a great 40-minute set. I started the show alone in the photo pit, and after the first three songs, I moved around the venue
shooting from a wide variety of vantage points.
When Cope and the band took to the stage, I was back in the photo pit and ready to go. Following the standard rules of concert photography, the photo pit
is only used for the first three songs, so after they were over, I left the pit to shoot from as many other vantages that I could. With my all-access pass,
I had no problem finding other vantage points to shoot from.
The card performed flawlessly throughout the shoot, but the biggest bump in performance was after I returned to my office. When I used the UDMA card with a
new Lexar UDMA FireWire 800 card reader, the difference was really apparent. The download speed was fantastic!
I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to not only sort and edit my photos, but to import the photos onto my hard drive. On the import, I add copyright information,
shoot data, and keywords. This adds time to the import but with the increase in the download speed, my workflow was actually improved. Since this particular
shoot was close to home, I didn't do any on-site image processing, but that is not always the case. I have recently upgraded my laptop to a new Apple MacBook
Pro with the new 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, with 4GB of RAM and more importantly, a FireWire 800 port. Now I can use the new UDMA FireWire reader on the road.
The Lexar Professional UDMA CompactFlash cards come with a speed rating of 300x and download speeds of 45MB per second. These UDMA cards and the new Lexar
Professional UDMA FireWire 800 card reader combo is a fantastic addition to any professional photographer's workflow. At the time of this writing, there
are currently no Nikon cameras that that use the UDMA technology, so there is no speed boost in taking the photos, but with new cameras being released all
the time, it won't be long until the cameras take advantage of the this faster technology.
Alan Hess Bio
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