• Teams: Fair Grove Eagles VS Springfield Catholic Irish

• Photos: 39

• Original high-res photos are available at 4928 x 3264 – contact me.

Here are some of the shots from the session. Hope you enjoy…

The other day I made a quick list of the things I’ll be needing to bring with me and what I had to do to prepare. The list was rather short; consisting mainly of the camera and lenses that would be used, we well as reminders to charge the batteries.

Tonight (the day before the shoot), I looked through my list, organized my camera bag and made sure all the batteries were charged, I then packed my bag and made a mental note to check the ISO settings on each camera on location before the action happened. My son will have my D70 with a 50mm f/1.8 lens and I’ll be using my new D7000 with the 70-200 f/2.8. I set the D70 to RAW to allow for a broader range of changes to be done later; while my D7000 remained on JPEG simply because the RAW photos are so huge I’d rather not deal with them. < Not the best advice, but I don’t have the most awesome computer processing power and infinite storage devices to deal with RAW most of the time.

Well, I guess that’s enough for one blog entry. Wish me luck ad check back in a few days to see the photos from the graduation. They’ll also be on my Flickr account.

1) Make sure you have a battery in your camera

I hopefully learned both of these lessons today, after failing both of them; resulting in me getting no photos at all at church today of our first choir performance, kids pizza party and of my son’s bloody nose during church after getting kicked in the head by his sister.

I put my battery (the only one i have) on the charger last night. The main issue came with me closing the battery door on the camera and returning it to the camera case; thus looking like it’s ready to go. Some things I could have done to fix this might be:

• Don’t close the battery door (this might not be safe for risk of dust, etc)
• When the battery is out, tie some kind of ribbon/bow on the camera as a visual indicator
• Pay the $50 and get another battery so there is always one in the camera while the other one is charging

This lesson came about after I realized that the choir was singing and I had only brought my 50mm f/1.8 lens My new 70-200 f/2.8 would have been a great lens to use for this event. I didn’t bring in the first place because it’s heavy, bulky, and a pain to carry around. If it was in the car though, I could have easily gone and got it in plenty of time. This lesson really didn’t matter today though because I didn’t have a battery anyway ~ but it was something that would have made a difference. Some things to help for next time:

My wife allowed me to get such an extravagant gift because it was about time I stopped talking so much about it. She also was a fan of me being able to use it for her upcoming graduation and celebration later in December.

For the next few weeks and months, I’m hoping to transition this website more towards the photography realm. Stay tuned for more updates.