Breathe

There are many things that can, and often do, go wrong at a wedding. One possibility that most don’t worry or even think about is media card or equipment failure. After a long day working hard to capture the event from start to finish, a photographer still has to put that card into a computer… and wait.

If the card fails, some higher end cameras have a second card that mirrors the first, so you can jump over to that one. Those are not cheap, and contribute to the cost of wedding photography. But if the camera itself fails / gets dropped in a fountain / is stolen, and both cards are lost, you have a real problem.

I’ve always been fortunate enough that none of these things have as yet happened to me or my brides, but every photographer knows someone it has happened to. Nightmare scenarios that don’t bear thinking about. But they are always there in the back of your mind on the drive home alone in the dark.

The worry grows as you sit down in front of the computer and start the file import. There is no guarantee that all those files will import. Sometimes a card fails half way. Just as the happy couple enter the church, for example. Everything else is lost. So it is not until the import process is fully complete and all files are on the hard drives that a photographer is able to breathe a little easier.

But we’re still not out of the woods. What if a power surge fries the computer? If the media card is still in the computer, that may get fried too. Only when those thousands of files are all imported, the media card(s) are removed to a place of safety, and the hard drive is backed up (preferably to an offsite cloud service) can a photographer breathe easy.

And then we can begin the real work.