Many ask about the gear I use. Being a major gadget geek, I’m always more than happy to talk about my favorite subject. Bellow you’ll find my current setup.

FYI – if you’re into photography as well and have any questions about Canon Cameras or Lenses, stop me at a game or drop me an email and ask – like I said I love talking about this stuff and I’m always willing to share my experiences with different gear I use.

Body 1: Canon 1DmkII – The cornerstone of my arsenal, Super-fast auto focus, focus tracking and a blistering frame rate. It still puts a smile on my face every time I press the shutter release and rattle off 20 frames in under 3 seconds.

Body 2: Canon 5DmkII - The ‘new toy’ - my main portrait body.  At 21 Megapixels, this boy’s got the resolution for some crystal clear shots. It’s low light ability makes it great for shooting indoor events without flash and while it’s not as fast as my 1D for sports its ability to shoot HD video may get it a spot on the sidelines of some future games.

Body 3: Canon 10D – the back up.

Lenses:Most all of my Lenses are Canon’s ‘L’ Series. Canon says “these lenses use special optical technologies [such as] Ultra-low Dispersion UD glass, Super Low Dispersion glass, Fluorite elements, and Aspherical elements to truly push the optical envelope.”

Watch the sidelines of any professional sporting event and you’ll see a wall of these White lenses, usually Identified with the red stripe around the front of the lens. Why shouldn’t our kid’s touchdowns, home runs, or goals be captured with anything less than the same equipment that shoots the pros?

Lens 1 & 2: Canon 300mm F4L - the ‘big boy’. A tack sharp prime used to reach out and get close on sports with large fields like tackle football. NEW: Canon 300mm 2.8L I’m really excited about adding this lens to ‘the arsenal’. Regarded by most as the sharpest lens canon has ever made, also one of the fastest focusing – it is the lens for sports photography. Coming in at just over 8 pounds of glass, this is the new ‘big boy’ in my bag – This images this lens takes are just amazing and well worth the back ache I get carrying it!

Lens3: Canon 70-200 F4L - the ‘work horse’ and my main lens for shooting smaller field sports like U7 Soccer,T-ball, flag football etc.

Lens4: Canon 24-105 F4L - Versatile lens used on sidelines and portrait shots.

Lens5: Canon 17-40 F4L – Wide Angle zoom used on Team portraits and some indoor work.

Lens6: Canon 50 F1.8 - Lightweight fast lens used for close up indoor work with low light.

Lens7: Canon 15 F2.8 fisheye – for creative work.

Lens8: Canon 85mm F1.2L - Canon’s ‘definitive portrait lens’. An amazing piece of glass that has the ability to isolate the subject by turning distracting backgrounds into a soft out of focus blur. It’s also gathers more light than any other Canon lens in production making it ideal for low light, indoor situations.

Post Processing Computer – “I’m a PC” (yea I’m a geek and totally not cool enough to own a Mac) Intel based dual core OC’d at 3.2Ghz, 8GB DDR28000, Radieon x1300GPU, lost track of how many TB of Hard disks I have.

Software

Windows XP Professional x64bit – No Vista here – too ‘Mac Like’ and as a geek I’m more interested in solid performance and don’t need a bunch of pretty graphics effects eating up my processing power. The 64bit version lets me use all 8GB of ram I stuffed in this box which really makes working with the massive image files a breeze.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 – My main workhorse, all images are imported, converted and organized and posted to the site with this great tool. It’s been a major workflow improvement over my old method. 90% of my post processing is done with Lightroom as well.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 - The main tool for image manipulation – not part of my main workflow anymore since light room but its used when I need to touch up portraits or get distracting items out of the background.

Adobe Illustrator CS3 – Primarily used for doing special graphics work – Calendars, Team posters, Magazine covers, etc.

Corel Painter X – Used for My ‘Artistic’ series of work. The only tool to use if you want to work with ‘natural media’ like watercolors, chalk, pastels, ink, etc. with real photographs – cool tool.

Other Stuff: Waccom Intuos 2 9×12 tablet, Logitec 3d mouse, EyeOne2 Colorimeter, Epson 10000XL Fine Art Scanner, Epson 4000PRO Printer.