Camera Disaster Leads to Rethink

While in Iceland recently, I took a bunch of great photos. I was really pleased with some of them from the first day in Reykjavik and the second in the hills. Only, bad things happened. My ageing camera (a 6 year old 400D) nearly lost us two days of photos. The on/off switch is very light now after so many years of use and so are the nav buttons... Yep, you guessed it.

Unfortunately, this combination led to hip bumping which managed to a) turn the camera into french, b) change all the white balance and metering settings, and c) format the memory card! We only noticed because Katy was looking through the photos while I was driving to the next stop. She said "oh, did you change memory cards, there are only 86 photos on this one?" Erm, no, that was the 8GB card I'd planned on using for the whole trip.

We immediately stopped using that memory card and changed over to another. When we got home, I was able to recover the majority of the photos from the card using Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery. I've used other software before, but this one works and was pretty cheap for the full version. I don't mind paying for good software!

The reason for this article is that I've realised that the current trend of bigger and bigger memory cards is not actually a good one. I wanted to share my thinking on this and hopefully minimise any loss that people suffer through a bad card, a faulty camera or a stolen camera bag.

I've bought a number of SD cards. Amazon were doing 4GB SD cards for about £4 each at the time of writing. I also bought an SD to Compact Flash converter because my old camera uses CF. Most current cameras use SD cards - including the Canon 60D that will be the replacement for my current one. So I've saved my investment too.

The regime will be as follows: