Format all of your compact flash cards before you leave your studio for a wedding. 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!
Make sure all of the memory cards you take to a wedding have been formatted before you leave for your wedding.
Add it to your checklist. Never erase a memory card at a wedding.
By Aric C. Hoek, owner and creator of Ten Houston Wedding Photographers
Aric C. Hoek BFA, CPP, AuthorPPBF Administrator
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As an add-on to this, which is very important Aric, thank you for bringing it up.
Consider that you have multiple cameras of the same brand, but different styles. We carry three to four cameras to each Wedding. But, two of the cameras cannot read the format of the other ones. You put a memory card in, and it appears to be empty, but for some reason you decide to format it. Guess what, you just deleted half-a-cards worth of images from the other camera from that Wedding.
I second what Aric said: Never format a card at a Wedding!