On-Site Backup: The Twenty Minutes That Save the Whole Job
TIME&SPACE · Photographer's Edge
Card failure is rare and total. A simple on-site routine costs twenty minutes across a shoot and removes the one risk you cannot apologise your way out of.
On-Site Backup: The Twenty Minutes That Save the Whole Job
In short: Every other mistake in event photography can be explained. A lost card cannot. Two copies before you leave the venue is the entire discipline, and it is worth building the schedule around it.
You can recover from bad light, a missed speech, an unflattering frame of the sponsor. You cannot recover from a card that will not mount, because there is nothing to recover from.
This is the only failure in the job with no partial outcome and no second attempt. It deserves a routine rather than good intentions.
Two copies before the car
The rule is simple and unglamorous: the files exist in two physical places before you leave the site. Card plus laptop, laptop plus portable drive, whatever the kit allows. Two things that would have to fail together.
The tempting version is to do it at home. Home is on the other side of a journey, and journeys are where bags get left and cars get broken into. Do it while the crew is packing down.
Do not format in the field
Formatting a card at the venue to buy space is how people lose a morning's work. If you are running short, put the full card away and open a fresh one. Cards are cheap relative to a single re-shoot that cannot happen.
Keep shot cards somewhere physically separate from empty ones. A different pocket is enough. The mistake is almost always reaching into the wrong pocket in a hurry.
Upload as the second copy
If your delivery platform is receiving originals anyway, the upload doubles as your offsite copy and starts the processing at the same time. That is two jobs from one action.
It also gets photographs to guests hours earlier, which is the other reason to do it on site. The upload is not overhead. It is the delivery.
Write down what you shot
A one-line note per card or per session, taken at the time, saves an hour of scrubbing later: which camera, which part of the event, roughly what time. When something is missing, that note tells you instantly whether it was never shot or has gone astray.
It is the least interesting habit in this list and the one that pays back most often.
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