Scott's recent trip to Senegal, Africa, was an exercise in versatility to say the least. Combing through millions of people all converged on four square blocks in search of the perfect picture was the daily routine for Scott and his crew for anywhere from 15-20 hours for one week.

For the past four years, Duncan has traveled to the small city of Touba to cover the annual Grande Magal festival, a Sufi-Muslim celebration in which millions come together to worship the life of Cheikh Bamba, a religious leader and practitioner of nonviolence. Duncan has spent these years documenting faces, architecture, religious ritual, and the sheer magnitude of the event itself for a feature length documentary and accompanying book of photographs.

For this year's visit, Scott brought four still cameras in his bag: the Canon Mark 3 1D, the Canon Mark 2 5D, a Contax 645 outfitted with a Phase One P30 digital back, and a Hasselblad Xpan, and, of course, a pouch full of Lexar Professional UDMA 300x CompactFlash cards.

Covering the Grande Magal is no easy endeavor, but Duncan, with the help of some very helpful local guides, was able to gain more access to the event than any photographer before him. Whether it was filming and photographing thousands participating in the sunrise prayer from the roof of Touba's sacred Mosque, to capturing moments of worship in the tomb of Cheikh Bamba himself, Duncan was lucky enough to witness and capture it all.

Another difficulty throughout this trip was that of media management. Scott had a lot of cameras, and shot a lot of photos. Because of the "running and gunning" style of shooting that this event required, there was not time to download photos from the flash cards onto drives until the evenings before bed. Luckily the Lexar cards proved to be completely reliable. It was not uncommon to shoot an average of over 10-20 gigabytes of photos a day, and there was never once an incident of card corruptions or issues of files writing to the cards.

The cards also performed well when used with the Phase One P30 back. The P30 digital back shot staggeringly large images that took up 25 megabytes each. The 300x Lexar were able to load up these images surprisingly quickly when Scott needed to review them in the camera. The cards also worked amazingly with the Canon 5D when shooting HD video.

Because these cards worked so well, Scott was able to focus on the real challenge, finding and capturing those perfect moments to truly tell the story of this event.

Scott Duncan Bio