Do you wanna go faster??

A couple of weekends ago I had to shoot a wedding. I did not start out as the photographer but became him when the other fellow failed to show. I'll have a post on that soon. Anyhow, long story short I had to get a bunch of shots on to my laptop in a hurry to make room and after shooting the wedding I needed to pull the shots to make some quick prints. I was not prepared to do this much work so I didn't have my Canon battery charger. Fortunately I had the battery grip and two freshly charged batteries so the camera did everything with a wee bit of juice to spare.

I got to thinking though that a fast card reader may be a good idea. Not only to save time and battery life but in critical situations where you need to fee up some memory cards it could be a lifesaver. Enter the Hoodman RAW-FW8.

I picked one up this past weekend - $100 from The Camera Store. This little baby copied 386 files (2.98GB) from a 4GB Lexar 233x CF card in 1 minute and 36 seconds. By contrast my Canon 40D copied the same batch in 9 minutes and 17 seconds. WOW! Slower CF cards take longer to copy but at least you're not tying up your camera or depleting its battery.

This gadget will be accompanying me on future shoots.