03.02.08 : How secure are your photos?
Up to quite recently, photographers had to rely on memory cards and hope it would not fail through the middle of a shoot or before it's uploaded onto a computer. Unfortunately, memory cards do fail for whatever reason and if one reads around photography forums, there are countless stories of cards failing (or formatted accidentally) and photographers losing photos of an entire day's shoot.
To avoid this, make sure your photographer shoots with a camera with a DUAL CARD slot and also make sure he/she puts it in DUAL WRITE mode rather than memory saving OVERFLOW mode. This means that the same photo is written to BOTH cards so in the event one fails, then the other can be used.
If the photographer does not have a camera with such a feature, ask them what they would do if the card should fail with all the photos on it. The real simple answer is that nothing can be done and it's just plain bad luck! It is rare that it will happen, but Murphy's law says it will sooner or later. Bringing a laptop along to backup photos is simply not an excuse as the chance of memory failure is still there, prior to copying it over to a laptop.
I shoot with two Nikon D3 bodies that have two memory card slots on each. There is only one other camera that has this feature and it's the Canon 1DS body.
After the shoot, I upload the photos onto the computer. I then make two copies of all the photos onto DVD and then leave a copy offsite (not where the images on the computer are held) and one onsite. This will avoid loss of images due to fire, theft or hard drive failure.
Once the initial backup of the original files are complete, I will start editing the photos. Once edited they're all uploaded onto my website for clients to view and share. Keep in mind these are all full size, high resolution images so that in an absolute worse case scenario that both DVD's are lost/stolen and images are lost from the computer, they're still available to be recovered from the net. My website hosting offers 4 levels of data backup and protection, so that can be considered full-proof!
Once all the images are edited, I make two copies on DVD, one for the client and one for myself and one copy is left on the computer HDD.
That is my backup procedure from start to end. You should be aware what procedure your wedding photographer uses and if he/she has a camera that has two memory slots.
back : blogs : next
Up to quite recently, photographers had to rely on memory cards and hope it would not fail through the middle of a shoot or before it's uploaded onto a computer. Unfortunately, memory cards do fail for whatever reason and if one reads around photography forums, there are countless stories of cards failing (or formatted accidentally) and photographers losing photos of an entire day's shoot.
To avoid this, make sure your photographer shoots with a camera with a DUAL CARD slot and also make sure he/she puts it in DUAL WRITE mode rather than memory saving OVERFLOW mode. This means that the same photo is written to BOTH cards so in the event one fails, then the other can be used.
If the photographer does not have a camera with such a feature, ask them what they would do if the card should fail with all the photos on it. The real simple answer is that nothing can be done and it's just plain bad luck! It is rare that it will happen, but Murphy's law says it will sooner or later. Bringing a laptop along to backup photos is simply not an excuse as the chance of memory failure is still there, prior to copying it over to a laptop.
I shoot with two Nikon D3 bodies that have two memory card slots on each. There is only one other camera that has this feature and it's the Canon 1DS body.
After the shoot, I upload the photos onto the computer. I then make two copies of all the photos onto DVD and then leave a copy offsite (not where the images on the computer are held) and one onsite. This will avoid loss of images due to fire, theft or hard drive failure.
Once the initial backup of the original files are complete, I will start editing the photos. Once edited they're all uploaded onto my website for clients to view and share. Keep in mind these are all full size, high resolution images so that in an absolute worse case scenario that both DVD's are lost/stolen and images are lost from the computer, they're still available to be recovered from the net. My website hosting offers 4 levels of data backup and protection, so that can be considered full-proof!
Once all the images are edited, I make two copies on DVD, one for the client and one for myself and one copy is left on the computer HDD.
That is my backup procedure from start to end. You should be aware what procedure your wedding photographer uses and if he/she has a camera that has two memory slots.
back : blogs : next
