I am contractually obligated to show up at a specific time, and a specific place, each weekend. And, I must be prepared to perform to the best of my abilities. Which means there is some prep work before heading out to photograph a wedding.
Primarily, I am getting my equipment ready.
Cleaning my camera for dust is the first step in maintaining quality images.
Secondly, I must charge all of my batteries. It;s a real drag to show up at a wedding only to find out that you have no fresh batteries to use for your flashes and cameras.
And lastly, I erase all of my flash cards.
Imagine you are photographing a wedding and it is late in the evening. You realize that the card you are shooting on is now full and needs to be switched out with another card. So you reach into your camera bag and pull out another Compact Flash card. You check to see if there are any images on the card, only to find the card is filled with images that you shot yesterday during a family
portrait session. You know you have downloaded the family portraits already, and it is safe to erase them.
You erase the card to make room for the images you are about to shoot.
It turns out, that you actually used that card for both the family portrait session AND earlier in the evening during the ceremony. Because you didn’t look through all the images on the card, you didn’t see the images you took earlier that evening.
You just erased hundreds of images from your client’s wedding!
That’s why it’s on my wedding check list to erase my cards at home before I leave home. Never erase a memory card at a wedding.
Aric C. Hoek BFA, CPPProfessional Photographer
2012 President PPGH
