You've got the right idea! Another good reason to have a back up is so you dont screw over your client and ruin your reputation by having a camera break down on you. ...
BTW.. how are you liking your D7000?
Well, my client gives me his highest accolade, "I couldn't do better myself"
I need to stop drooling over my D7000.
Such a capable piece of kit. It taken a while to get used (sort of, it's an ongoing process) the flexibility that it offers over the Powershot G3. It's a bit like learning to touch type - learn to press the buttons without looking at them.
Battery life is exceptional compared to what I've used previously. I bought a spare battery with the D7000 but even on an all day shoot with no flash running to 1000+ images (e.g. Judo competition) there's tons of battery life left at the end of the day. I'm sure that after three years and a few hundred recharges the battery won't be quite so great but it's plenty good for now.
Speed and accuracy of focussing are generally excellent and although the auto focus will sometimes decide on the wrong thing as the main focus point, it is generally very good and probably will improve once I get more used to driving the various focus options (still really have to try out the 3D/motion prediction option properly). To be clear, the focussing is excellent, certainly very noticeably superior to the D80 that I had borrowed before I bought the D7000.
Noise control is good and noise is pretty much invisible below ~ISO640 and acceptable at higher settings up to ISO3200.
Image quality (especially with the 70-200 VRII) is outstanding.
Bottom line: I am very, very, very pleased with it.
Other things I'm pleased with:
- The staff at the the Sauchiehall Street branch of Jessops in Glasgow were outstanding. Jessops online service had screwed up (and continued to do so). The issue is never that something had gone wrong but how the problem is dealt with. The staff at the branch (Mike+Martyn) were great. They understood what I wanted and some of the time pressure that I was under (big Judo competition the next weekend). They loaned me equipment for the week and a half that it was going to take (allegedly - in the end the online folk took 5 weeks to fix everything) to sort out matters and then gave me a fantastic discount on some of the sundries that I was buying (apparently, I'm an educational institution and bulk buying!) I don't bother with the online service now. It is a bit more expensive in the shop but service like that deserves to see some more of my money.
Things I'm not so pleased about:
- D7000, 70-200 VRII, 18-105 VR + Manfroto tripod = sore back
- The Manfroto quick release seems to have been designed so that it sticks out from the back of the camera and digs into you when off the tripod.
- On the second big day out, some of the images had the dreaded sparkly green bands across them. Oh no! Fortunately, they were in random positions across the image and I had seen something like that before. The "solution" (as in, I haven't had the problem since so I assume it is fixed) is to format the SD cards to clear them rather than using the file delete option. My hypothesis is that the flash becomes fragmented and requires additional read-change-write cycles in those circumstances and the controller can't keep up with the data rate from the camera.
- I'm still experimenting with finding a good workflow for processing large numbers of raw images. Currently, I'm using a mixture of Digikam for image management and basic processing and Raw Therapee for bulk and detail work.
- Me. I need a better reaction time, I need to learn not just to shoot bursts in the hope that something might happen, I really need to improve my eye for landscape - I live in a beautiful part of the country and yet I've failed to capture it, I need to learn to take risks (e.g. A relative [Canon Rebel T1i owner] takes (in general) a large number of often poorly focussed [the Canon is partially to blame, I was not impressed with the auto focus] photographs and she takes them when I wouldn't [to much back lighting, poor focussing conditions, not enough light, blah, blah] and the average standard on my photos is (he says, modestly) a fair bit better. And yet, and yet, her best photos have far exceeded anything I have done, because she hasn't followed the "rules". Still, I live in the hope that knowing I need to improve is the first step in the process of actually improving.
I think I'm also going to have to get a bumper sticker for my other tripod, "My other tripod's a Manfroto".
On holiday, we went to an area which one could see would be popular with photographers and, indeed, there was a guy there with all the gear. As a result of the aforementioned sore back, I had brought my cheap and nasty light weight tripod and I could see him quietly sneering at my noobness.
