Don’t Cram Too Much on One Card

One thing a lot of pros do to help avoid disaster is to not try to cram all their photos on one huge memory card, especially when shooting for a paying client. Here’s why: Let’s say you’re shooting a wedding and you want to capture everything on one 8-GB card, so you don’t have to switch cards. That’s cool, as long as the card doesn’t go bad (but sadly my friend, cards do go bad—not often, but it happens. It’s a sobering fact of digital photography, but remember that traditional film can go bad as well—there is no “never fails” film). So, if you get back to your studio and find that your 8-gig card took a fatal dive, every photo from that wedding may be gone forever. You might as well just sit by the phone and wait for their lawyer to call. That’s why many pros avoid the huge-capacity cards, and instead of using one huge 8-GB card, they use four 2-GB cards. That way, if the unthinkable happens, they only lose one card, and just one set of photos. With any luck, you can save the job with the 6 GB of photos you have on the other three cards, and avoid a really harrowing conversation with “the attorney representing the bride and groom.”