The worst nightmare an event photographer can have is loosing the event photos due to a card malfunction, loss, theft etc… In "early days", we either took the risk not having a backup, or had to carry our laptop computer or a portable hard-disk to which we uploaded our photos during the event. Not the optimal solution, I would say. During an event I like to have my mind focused on shooting rather then running to my laptop to check if the copy has ended, and keeping one eye guarding the laptop and my card so nobody "adopts" them…
So, times have changed and today's top end cameras like Canon 1D mark-II/III or Nikon D3 offer a way to backup your photos in real time, by writing them on two separate memory cards. This is done by using two cards in two slots (Canon typically have a mix of one CF slot and one SD slot while Nikon have two CF slots) and selecting the appropriate option from your menus. Many photographers never use that priceless feature but I say – if your work is about photographing once in a lifetime events, make sure you have enough memory to record all photos twice and use the backup option of your camera.
Not too long ago I was shooting photos for an architect in some of his flagship projects. When I returned back to the studio I found out a Compact-flash card has died on me and all of the photos recorded on that 2GB card are lost. Now, although the job type was not an event and I could virtually go back and take those photos once again, I had my backup feature turned on and the SD card recorded my photos simultaneously. That saved me precious time and lots of apologies…
