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July 23, 2004

Better Late Than Never... (and all about the tech gear)

Elisabeth and I are - FINALLY - in Boston. It's almost 2 AM and I'm sitting on the bed posting the blog entry I thought would never see the light of day.

We arrived at Dulles Airport at about 3:30 PM for a 5:30 PM flight that should have arrived in Boston at 7 PM. First it moved to 5:45, then 6-something, then sometime after 7 PM. Then 9:30 PM. Then 10:30 PM. At one point we lined up at the gate ready to roll only to be told they had made a mistake - off to another gate. We got there and were told they needed a new flight attendant. So we sat... and griped... and developed those fleeting, sarcasm-laden friendships based on mutual frustration with people we'll never see again for the rest of our lives.

At about 11:45 PM, we finally took off for Boston. We staggered into our accomodations around 1:30 AM after a pleasant cab ride that I'd have taken from DC had I been given the option earlier today.

Here is the enormous, geeky entry I wrote earlier in Dulles but was never able to post since I couldn't find any (expletive) wireless access:

Elisabeth and I are now sitting in Dulles airport awaiting our very delayed plane to Boston. Departure time now has moved beyond the original arrival time in Boston. Independence Air seems super cool with a nice, geeky touch-screen check-in at the terminal entrace. It's been lickety-split from getting out of the car (after a 3 hour drive) to being seated at our gate... but air-traffic control snarls and weather have things backing up rapidly. Such is life.

I was eager to have some sit-down time here to check news and post this blog entry, but I'm having to write offline due to a lack of wireless net access in the terminal. No free access, anyway. I ran around using the laptop like a digital divining rod in search of a signal, but found precisely squat. I caught up with Laura and a few other friends via AIM on my Treo, though, and heard that the police union dispute was settled at 4 PM today. I don't know any details right now, but I put that in the positive category thus far.

We got packed pretty smoothly this morning and haven't yet had any "oh crap" moments from realizing we forgot something. If weight is any indication, though, I imagine we're fine. I'm walking around looking like I'm heading for Mt. Everest without a team of Sherpas. I carry on all of my precious electronic gear and never check it with my luggage. Arriving without pants and a toothbrush I can tolerate. Arriving with a broken or missing laptop (15" and 17" Powerbooks), GPS, Wacom tablet, firewire drive, power adpter, camera or about fifty other doodads must be avoided at all costs.

I gave Elisabeth my camera backpack since it was the lightest of the two bags. Being the lightest of the two doesn't say much, though, and the effects on her petite frame were communicated to me through an array of facial expressions that I would associate more with childbirth. In an attempt to redeem myself, though, I went on a Starbucks quest that had me walking about halfway back to Lynchburg. She just zonked off next to me in the chair. I continue to envy her ability to sleep upright in public places.

Speaking of gear, I'll take this time to cover a little of what I'm using and what our predicted workflow will be in Boston. Those with an aversion to technobabble should fear for their lives in the following paragraphs. I hope the geek crowd, though, will get their questions answered.

Camera-wise, I use a firmware modified Canon 300D that encompasses most of the features of its higher priced big brother, the 10D. This camera uses a 6.3 megapixel CMOS sensor that can take silky smooth shots in the lower and mid ISOs and is still VERY acceptable even at 1600 or 3200 ISO. I also keep a spare Canon Powershot G5 in the bag as a point-and-shoot backup to loan to friends for additional candid shots. For those doubting the power of a consumer-level Powershot, you can peruse my shots from France taken with its simpler predecessor, the G2. I prefer and will rely on my digital SLR in Boston, of course, but encourage people to realize how much you can achieve with a "consumer" digital camera.

For low-light situations, I use a Canon Speedlite 420EX but use it predominantly handheld for flexibility. It is triggered wirelessly by a Canon ST-E2 mounted on the hotshoe. Canon's E-TTL wireless control is really amazing and essentially functions with all of the exposure capabilities of the flash being hot-shoe mounted. I have a Kirk Enterprises macro bracket that converts into numerous wicked shapes and can serve as a flash bracket when neeeded.

I will possibly supplement my lens slection in Boston by renting one or more L-class lenses once I have a sense of my situational needs. Depending on my floor time during the convention, distance from the podium, etc., I will rent an extended telephoto with built in image stabalization. I also might pick up an L-class wide zoom as well. These are decisions I can make, though, in the coming days after I get to see our environment firsthand.

Rentals aside, I'm carrying a 28-80mm f3.5 zoom, an approximately 80-320mm f3.5-f4.5 telephoto zoom with ultrasonic motors (USM), and a 45-215mm f3.5-f4.5 zoom with USM and gyroscopic image stabilizers (IS). I'm approximating the measurements here since the 300D (and its bretheren) have about a 1.6x multiplier on their focal lengths due to the sensor being somewhat smaller than a normal 35 mm frame.

As for storage, I prefer to have an array of medium to small CF cards rather than to put all of my eggs in one basket with bigger. Nothing bothers me more than the thought of taking hundreds of shots and having it all swirl the bowl due to a media failure. On that note, I'm carrying two 1 GB SanDisk Ultra-II CF's, one 512 MB CF, two 256 MB CF's and two 128 MB CF's. This works out to around 1,000 shots at the highest quality or about a third less if I'm shooting RAW images before needing to unload the media. I doubt I'll be shooting anywhere near that many between card dumps and image processing.

On the computer side, I'm carrying two laptops, only one of which I'll be using most of the time. The other laptop is for Elisabeth to use and doubles as our backup. My primary laptop is a 17" Powerbook with 1 GB RAM and 80 GB hard drive. The second is a 15" Powerbook with 1 GB RAM and a 60 GB hard drive. Both are nearly identically equipped in terms of software which includes iView MediaPro for image sorting and Photoshop CS for editing. I've got my small pressure sensitive drawing tablet with me since you can't go back to a mouse once you're used to that level of control.

Both laptops are wireless capable, so the hotel and Fleet Center are our major connection points for sending finished pieces to the blog. Raw image catalogs and other material will be managed locally on these computers and shared with Laura and others on their systems via a peer-to-peer, ad-hoc wireless network. Catalogs of images in iView are usuable cross-platform between our Macs and others' PC's including all of our choice catalogs being sent back to my servers at home for Wally to pick up.

We're archiving stuff on the fly throughout the trip. The 17" laptop can write both DVDs and CDs and I have spindles of both in the check-in luggage. The 15" laptop can write CDs and we have an 80 GB bus-powered firewire drive with us as well.

This is, more or less, the plan minus most of the mind-numbing details (yes, that was the short version if you can believe it). Plans often crash headlong into reality, of course, but I'm pretty adaptable. We shall see.

Well, our flight just bumped back another hour - enough so that we could have flown there and back again by the time we're now scheduled to be leaving Dulles. Hopefully I'll get to post this once we're in Boston tonight...

Posted by amahler at July 23, 2004 01:47 AM

Comments

I just hope my trip goes much smoother then that!!

Posted by: Dominic at July 24, 2004 12:05 AM