Little Adventures: Event Well-Covered . . . With A Point-And-Shoot

Well, it's actually more than a point-and-shoot. It was my ageing Canon Powershot G7 that I chose to bring to our club's (Doha Pinoy Shooters Club) 2nd Anniversary Party. Much have been written and said about that so I will not tell the story again. Instead, I will concentrate on sharing the experience of photo-covering an event without my precious DSLR.

It was a formal event where I had other tasks and equipments to bring at hand for that event. Photo-coverage was a personal task. For this reason, I chose to be discreet and settled on bringing just the G7, an external flash, and the ST-E2 flash trigger - that's my compact working strobist gear set. This is my usual setup when doing experiments only. This is actually the first time I'm using this gear set for an actual photoshoot - an event photoshoot.

Initially, I felt so vulnerable and uncapable without my DSLR, a couple more flashes, another lens and several light stand / tripods. Fortunately, the function room had cocktail tables tall enough to just let my one flash to stand in any one and move it as I move around and then bounce the light off the ceiling.

I was surprised at how good the reslts turned out. Not excellent but not bad. There were a few problems though.

The G7's lens is not wide enough and therefore the general group shot to include all 80 attendees was not taken as it usually should be. I had to find another angle to take my shot (not the official group shot). I liked the result but I still wished I had a wider lens. Perhaps the later models - G10, G11 would be more suitable.
I'm not used to the shutter lag anymore. As a result, I had very little success in capturing rare moments.
Because it is basically still a digicam, with small sensor, photos tend to get noisy at ISO 400. I guess that part was my mistake. I should have stuck to ISO 200 and forgot about Auto ISO. Then I would have had more consistent results.
For some reason, my ST-E2 will not cooperate when the G7 is in manual mode.
And then the ST-E2 has been automatically set to channel 3 and refuses to be reset to channel 1.