Weddingbee PRO

Today’s Guest Photographer post comes to us from Denver based photographer Jason Grubb.

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Four years ago, my sister married a man that had become my best friend. I was part of the best wedding ever. I had my camera with me, but only for fun! The wedding photographer captured everything. He was very nice, personable and enjoyable.

The wedding came and went. Matt and Jodi returned from their 10 days in Maui, tan and ready to view some of their wedding photos. The photographer let them know that their digital photos would be ready within a week or so.

Six weeks after the wedding, my sister received a phone call that no bride should ever receive. Her heart fell through the floor when her wedding photographer told her that his hard drive crashed, and he lost ALL of her pictures.

She was devastated. I was horrified. How could this happen? It should not have happened. It should never ever happen!

Well… everyone that had a camera at the wedding pooled their photographs together, and we made them an album. It was at least something…

Lesson: I take many, many precautions with my digital images.
 

1. Flash cards never leave my pockets at an event. I have a system of clearing all of my flash cards prior to an event. Empty flash cards go in my left pocket.
2. I check for images even when I load a new, cleared flash card into my camera. If there are images, they are from that day’s event.  It never happens, but I check just in case.
3. Full flash cards are put in their case in my right pocket. I can replace my camera gear if it disappears at an event. My pocket will be guarded with my life!
4. I backup my digital files at the reception. There is usually a couple of minutes for me and my assistant to download the images from full cards to my laptop as our first backup. The cards, with images, are then put back into my right pocket (safe and sound).
5. After the event, all of the images are stored on my desktop computer, then backed up to my external hard drive. Then they are backed up to my other external hard drive, then uploaded to my offsite storage. This all happens before I sleep.
6. Effectively, the day after an event, the images are stored on 5 hard drives (laptop, desktop, two external drives, and the flash cards) as well as 1 offsite storage site.
7. Finally, I have plenty of high capacity flash cards. I rotate my flash cards so that I do not use the same flash cards for back to back events.

Call it overkill… I’ll always back up, and back up, and then back up again.