"How Many Memory Cards Do You Have?"

Here's another question I get at most weddings.

Usually at weddings, I see a lot of camera-wielding guests. Most today have either a digital point & shoot camera or a disposable film camera. For these camera buffs, the sight of the big fancy digital SLR cameras I bring to weddings is just too much for their curiosity so it's just a matter of time before someone asks, "How many memory cards do you have?" The second question we've already covered in a past post, "How many megapixels is that camera?" :)

I carry a lot of memory cards with me. I try not to use cards that are too large too. It's better to keep changing cards than to fit lots of photos on one card. Why? For safety reasons. If something were to happen to one card, at least only some photos from the wedding is lost... not all photos from the wedding. New wedding photographers often make the mistake of getting huge cards and not changing them often. Or, to save money on buying cards, they will shoot the wedding on a lower resolution and lower size setting to get more images onto the card. Bad move, bad insurance and bad quality. It's much better to take the time to change cards often.

Film has a similar issue with possible image loss. A lab technician could accidentally overprocess the roll or at worst case, totally expose the roll to light losing all the images! I've never seen that happen (except in school a couple of times from some students), but the possibility is definitely there. I've never had a memory card go bad either, but why take chances! Actually, I think memory cards are safer than film on the long run. Deleted files can often be recovered. Exposed film can never be recovered.

For my 2005 weddings, I used 1 GB "Compact Flash" (CF) cards and 512 MB "xD" cards. But with the new D200 cameras coming soon, I recently purchased a few 2 GB cards because of the larger sized files the D200 is going to produce.

In all, I have eleven 1 GB CF cards, three 2 GB CF cards, four 512 GB xD cards and one 1 GB xD card. That totals 20 GB of cards! Will I use all that at a typical wedding? Yes... :)

File sizes are very large with big megapixel cameras. You can lower the resolution and size but you suffer image quality losses as well. I'd rather shoot at the largest size and resolution offered by my cameras to give the best quality. I expect a lot from my equipment and my clients expect a lot from me. So why bother with the inferior sizes?