On Assignment

One of the things I hate the most after shooting an assignment is waiting seemingly forever as my pictures are slowly downloaded from the memory cards into the computer.

No matter how fast your computer is, often times its the speed limit in the card and your card reader that causes those agonizing bottlenecks.

Well photo pros, wait no more, (or at least wait less) because Lexar has a new line of professional grade 300x speed compact flash cards now with arguably the fastest file transfer speeds ever. Its their Lexar Professional UDMA line of gold colored CF cards, ranging from 2 to 8 Gigabytes in capacity.

I just bought a couple of these in 2 and 4 GB flavors and also Lexar’s new Firewire 800 UMDA CF card readers. With the combination of using Lexar’s new UDMA CF cards and their UDMA reader, supposidely you can get card to computer transfer speeds of 45 Megabytes per second—–so says Lexar. This is the same speed claim as SanDisk’s brand new Ducati Extreme Edition UDMA cards, but since SanDisk just released them, at $164 MSRP for a 4 GB, i opted for Lexar’s more estabilished, more available, and definitely cheaper option. My Lexar cards were from B&H at $49.95 for the 2 GB, and $87.95 for the 4 GB. The Lexar UMDA card readers were $59.95 a piece.

The cool thing about the Lexar pro card reader is its stackable, and can be tethered off one another, so you can essentially download up to 4 different cards to your computer, all via fast Firewire connection, at once!

So how did the new Lexar cards fair out? Well in my very unscientific testing so far, I’ve been able to top out at about 21 MB/sec transfer speed, which is only half of what Lexar claims. But, compare that to only 3.9 MB/sec for old my SanDisk Ultra II cards, thats still 5 times faster! If it took 5 minutes to download my pictures before, now it’ll only take 1 minute. Thats 4 extra minutes for me to tag, crop, and upload when i’m on a deadline. Those few extra minutes could mean a lot at say the end of a big football game when every wire service is in competition with each other to get their pictures out the first. The earlier your pictures are on the news wires, the more chances they’ll be picked up for use by ESPN, SI, and all the other big media outlets.

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Monday was the season home opener for the Detroit Tigers, fresh from their AL Title last year. David Bergman, a frequent shooter for Sports Illustrated, let me assist him on the assignment.

I picked him up from his hotel by the airport at 8:30 in the morning and we got to Comerica Park well ahead of the 1pm game time. Always a good idea to be early!

The hope was to capture in a picture the fun atmosphere of the game, possibly large enough to be a doubletruck for SI’s “Leading Off” feature. So, naturally we thought overhead wide-angle was the way to go. Luckly I packed my 15mm fisheye, and had my full mounting gear in the car, so we were able to put up 2 remote cameras in the upper deck–one right next to the TV camera behind homeplate, and the other on the railings in section 323, facing the downtown skyline. My job was to man those two remotes and fire them during the pre-game festivities and a little bit of the first inning. David stayed in the away-team dugout right of home to get all the ground-level action.

Aside from a rather disappointingly lackluster pre-game (no flags over field or anything), the rest of the game went pretty well. There was a flyover after the national anthem, but my mount wasn’t aimed high enough to get it, just the plane’s shadows over the field…

When it came time around the 4th inning for us to transmitt the pictures to SI, I couldn’t get a good enough WiFi signal in the dugout, so I had to haul the laptop up to the press box and transmitt from there. Even with a much faster connection, it still took over 5 minutes per picture because SI demands all shots in RAW, meaning files around 6 to 8 MB each.

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So Rod went paparazzi on me putting up two remote cameras before the championship game of this year’s Big Ten Tournament in Chicago. They actually do a good job of showing my process.

Basically, the cameras are prepped first in the media work room. Then I clamp them to the basketball hoop arm, and another under the tables of press row. The hardest part of it all is figuring out where to focus the lens.

The last couple of shots show the end result of my two mounts. One from the basket angle, and the other, wide, from below press row.

Mini-gallery:

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