MANAGING WORRY(4/26/08) So I shot a big wedding last weekend. >3,000 files to sort. Had some scares. First, it was supposed to be an outdoor affair. I'd walked the grounds ahead of time with the father of the bride, so I knew just what to expect. Except... on the day, the weather closed in. A tent went up. The ceremony moved into the shade under a cramped porch (from a sunny penninsula reaching out into a lake). So strobes and selective focus both got much more of a workout than I'd anticipated. Naturally, my main strobe failed outright in the middle of a full-length bridal portrait prior to the ceremony. I thought at first my brand new BVS Pulsar battery packs had failed, but it turned out that a strobe I bought used had given up the ghost. I carried on using AA's in one of the smaller strobes I usually use for fill. Ten minutes later the plastic foot on a remote strobe cord broke and I retired my Stroboframe until I could make repairs at home. I was a bit freaked by then. What's next? Nothing much as it happened. One freshly-charged battery turned out to be dead, and in ten hours I filled an 8GB CF card and had to put an old 4GB Hitachi microDrive to work. (If you think it takes forever for a strobe to recharge when things are happening in front of the camera, try waiting for your buffer to clear when a bouquet is about to fly.) I sat down the day after the day after (the day after I was utterly exhausted) and made a list of things that could fail during a wedding and what I needed to do to prevent disaster. Get some new camera batteries. Buy a couple more CF cards. Get power adapters for my other strobes so high-capacity batteries don't turn into boat anchors when a flash takes a vacation. And for heaven's sake: find a backup camera body. My DSLR's have been stone reliable (except for the time I slung a Nikon D1 down two flights of concrete steps during a book project in San Diego, but please let's not think about that). A body failure would be an absolute disaster. I could beg, borrow, buy or steal a guest's point and shoot, I suppose, but it would be a real challenge to get good results. Weddings are challenging enough, and a spare, serviceable body is cheap compared to the psychic damage done by blowing a wedding. Later that night, out on the Astro-Mart, I found a gentleman selling a Canon 20D with 2 good-sized CF cards and two OEM batteries at a really good price. As a kicker, it had a Haoda diagonal split-prism viewfinder screen installed, an option I'd considered just last week. That would let me use my very fast, very old, manual-focus Nikon lenses with an EOS/Nikkor adapter. The screen would have been wonderful at the rehearsal dinner -- I tried to use a 55mm F1.2 for candlelit shots there. The otherworldly fast exposures were perfect, but my focus was off by miles. Ying Xian's used camera kit addressed most of the failure-points I could identify, so with 2 bodies, fresh batteries, lots of CF space, and another BVS adapter on the way... let's do more weddings and worry less. Here's a tip: If you shoot a wedding where the reception is adjacent a large swimming pool, be alert for the obvious if unlikely opportunity. Last weekend, the groomsmen pitched the groom into the shallow end. Do I have pictures? No, I do not. I was at the other end of the venue experimenting with some techniques for interesting group shots "while nothing was happening." Don't ever let that happen again.
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