DON'T PANIC

As the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Universe says, DON'T PANIC! Tonight, I got a frantic call from a friend. He was shooting a wedding when he had tried to review his last image. Suddenly his camera said that there were no images on his card. The counter on the top display said that he only had one image left, so something was on his card. But the monitor said there were no files on the card. Clearly something was wrong.

I told him to remove the card and set it aside and keep going. DON'T PANIC! It won't help. Just replace the card and keep shooting. As it turned out, the images were all there except the last one. Something happened and it was corrupted. That caused the camera to be unable to read the card. I was able to successfully download the card and determine that the images were there. This same thing happened to another friend a few weeks ago, but it happened to several different cards, which meant she was nearly out of memory. Her husband was about to go to Walgreen's and buy some more memory, but they were able to finish the night with what they had.

At Studio West, we shoot the entire wedding in raw mode. This takes the maximum memory. Our standing orders are to shoot raw (or NEF, or RAF, or RAW, or camera raw, or whatever). If, however, we are running out of memory at the reception, we can switch to Large Fine JPG for the dancing. If that still isn't enough, we can shoot with a lower resolution or more compression. You see, it pays to have a thought-out procedure; the proverbial Plan B!

Just an update for you all. I am in the midst of three weddings in five days plus a camp on the sixth day. I have some really great things from yesterday's wedding and should have some unusual things from tomorrow's wedding. I will post them early next week.