Claire's Degree: Broken Cameras / New Camera

I started having problems with one of my Canon 400D's a few months ago while photographing an in-line hockey tournament. I started to notice a delay between pressing the shutter and the actual photograph being taken. It is similar to what I had fixed on on my other 400D a while ago, that one would press half way to focus but wouldn't press fully down and it turned out the pad under the shutter button had slipped.

The chap that repairs and maintains my cameras has been looking to move out of the area and retire for a while now and as I can no longer get hold of him on the telephone sussect he has now succeeded so been using my second 400D as my main camera which has been fine until last Sunday. I had two ice hockey games to photograph and 2/3rds of the way through the second one I started to get ERR 99 and it stopped taking photographs. Error message said to turn off and on again and try removing and replacing the battery, all of which I did without success. I managed to finish the game using the camera with a shutter problem via a shutter release cable, not ideal but it got me through.

Nothing for it, after months of saving and ummm and arghing time to get down the shop and get a replacement. I decided to go for the Canon 60D, had been trying to choose between this and the 7D but hadn't saved up enough yet for the 7D.

I managed to get through about a third of the manual in the few days I had before my next ice hockey game which was last night so I knew the basic controls and had set it up for what I thought I needed for the rink in MK. The biggest thing I have noticed is how big the RAW files are comared to those from the 400D, I needed to convert to TIF at 50% to reduce the size enough for them to be more managable in the time frame I have post game and will have to review my server storage as it will be filling up a lot quicker now. Only have a couple of days before the next game I'm covering so will have to get my head down and read the rest of the manual. For now here are a few of the photographs taken with the 60D last night.