Did you read about the guy in England who recently photographed his friends’ wedding, didn’t back up the images from the memory card he used at the wedding, put the memory card in his wallet, and proceeded to lose the memory card during a bar fight the next week?

Yeah, I think that calling him the couple’s “friend” is the overstatement of the year. (It’s also a dire warning why trusting your wedding to a friend who isn’t actually a photographer, and clearly doesn’t take the role seriously, is a really, really bad idea.)

First of all, let me go on the record saying that, after a wedding or photo shoot, Danny and I head home and immediately upload all the images to our computer and two backup hard drives; then our images get backed up online, too. Once the images are on our computer, they’re saved in no fewer than three places, often four, before we format our compact flash cards (AKA delete the pictures from the memory cards so they’re blank and ready for our next shoot). All of this happens within hours of the time we finish photographing — not days, not a week.

But how do we keep track of our memory cards during a wedding? We definitely go through several cards at each wedding, and we definitely don’t think putting them in our wallets is a stroke of genius. We like having them neatly organized, securely stored together, and on us — in our Shootsacs or slipped into a pocket — at all times. If we stop for food after a wedding, we leave all our gear in the car, but we take the memory cards inside with us. It’s not called being paranoid, folks; it’s called “we’ve been robbed before.”

So when Danny came across the Hakuba Media Card Case, we knew it was the perfect fit for us.

Danny and I each have our own case — hey, do you think you can guess whose case is in the picture? We each head to a wedding with four CF cards at the ready, numbered and labeled, and as we fill up one card and move on to the next, we put the used cards into the case face-down, so we easily know which cards are still empty and ready to be used. It’s rare that we actually fill four cards each, but we like having plenty on hand in case of malfunction. Once we’re home from a shoot and the images have been removed from the CF cards, we store the cards in the Hakuba cases so we always know exactly where the cards are and don’t have to hunt them down next time we grab our cameras.

It’s amazing how such simple products can streamline your life and your workflow. Maybe not as amazing as thinking that a wallet is a good place to store a memory card full of wedding pictures. But still amazing.

~ Laura