Nono and I sorta kinda went on an impromptu Hidalgo trip, along with his orginal plan of having his ImageTank serviced.

Ended up buying this:

BG-E2 Battery grip for the 20D

Now to explain the whole battery grip business: It isn’t a useless thing. In fact, after a person gets used to battery grips, those grips may very well be at the top of the “to buy” list – right after a (D)SLR purchase.

It’s called a battery grip for the very reason that it allows you to put more batteries for your camera. more importantly though, is the feel and balance the grip gives your camera. It converts it to a “Pro SLR,” size-wise. The word pro in context of camera bodies, is a prefix that denotes a body class or type.

Usually found on super-high-end camera bodies, a Pro (D)SLR camera’s body is usually found to be larger than normal, for the reason that there’s a chunk at the bottom of what a regular (D)SLR would normally look. Controls are mirrored on this “additional section.” The purpose of mirroring these buttons is so that you can rotate the camera 90° and still shoot with the same hand orientation. Having trouble imagining that “same hand orientation” bit? Compare how I hold the camera here and here. The latter (though ironic, since it’s a lower model than the first) is similar to holding a Pro body type.

These “extra” features contribute to why these body types are called Pros – sort of like a beefed up version of a regular (D)SLR. And battery grips for the “regular” (D)SLRs essentially give them the same feature-set as the Pro bodies.

They’re also very helpful for weight displacement – a person with the same sized hands as mine (or larger) may very well know that you most probably cannot place your pinky right on non-pro bodies. Either you cram all your fingers, or simply leave your pinky free (or at the bottom) whenever you hold the camera.

Using the camera alone is fine. But what if you got bigger lenses, external flashes, flash brackets, etc? There is suddenly so much of this “forward-weight” messing up your camera’s center of gravity, and having only 2 fingers (since you’re using your index for the shutter) countering that weight – it can be pretty cumbersome after a time.

A Pro-(D)SLR body solves that since you have a lot of space to hold the camera with, plus it sorta adds “mass” to the body, hence pulling the center of gravity as close [back] to it as possible. And of course the whole “vertical/portrait shooting” thing mentioned ago.

The battery grip is great! The “grip” of the battery grip uses something similar to the 20D body itself – a leathery rubber layer stuck on the main material – unlike the 300D, where they simply “painted” some sort of compound on the plastic, which can be corroded by chemicals (I hear even sunbock can mess it up) Since the body and grip uses real rubber, then that should count for durability ;)

It also comes with an AA adapter cartrige – which allows you to power your camera using AA batteries (6 to be precise), not that I’ll be using it much though – a single BP-511A at 1390mAh can literally last weeks of casual shooting (days of serious shooting)… and I have 3 of them.

But of course, there’s always the chance that I can forget to bring the batteries (which has happened to some people), so I don’t mind having provisions for such emergencies.

I’ve also updated the firmware of my camera to 1.0.4, with complete disregard of the news that a lot of people ended up with dead 20Ds.

Fortunately, I used my tried and tested upgrade method: reckless abandon. And once again, it has served me well, as everything went smoothly. I was supposed to try it in mid-october, when my 20D replacement comes (oh, and I still owe an explanation for that, but not in this post), but I just couldn’t resist tinkering with stuff that can render expensive machines as useless bricks hehehe. In case you’re wondering – yes I do enjoy playing with fire too (when given the chance).