Digital Can Be Pretty Darn Frustrating

You know, we spend a lot of time as digital photographers talking up the advantages of digital but I thought I would take a little time to discuss some of the frustrations, not so much to dissuade someone from shooting digitally (there are after all strong advantages) but to give a realistic idea of the pitfalls, hassles, costs and frustrations of a digital workflow.

The working premise here is that you are photographing seriouslly - not necessarily professionally but you have made the decision to produce a quality print, one that could be sold or given as a present, and that you are proud of your images and would be devastated if you were to lose the images.

Hassles While Shooting

Probably the worst thing you can do is to erase a memory card. This might seem hard to do but here's how you do it - first you buy 3 or more cards and you rotate them. You think you have a system so you know which card you used last, but the light is changing and you're in a rush and you grab the wrong card and erase it ready for action, only it isn't the one that is unused, it's the one you finished shooting with. Two workable solutions are 1) have separate pockets in your backpack for used and unused memory cards - this has worked very reliably for me since I instituted it. 2) always take the full card out of your camera and immediately back it up to a portable hard drive - I have an Epson 2000 and use it when out photographing more than a couple of hours. It also helps to label the cards boldly so you know which is which. You cannot afford to play with your system - always use it. Most people choose to not erase the images until loading the used card back into the camera - thus buying a little more time to save an image if the system failed.

Unless absolutely desperate, don't erase images while out shooting - good chance you will erase the one image you wanted, or the last image of a 9 image stitch (thus spoiling the other eight).

Be absolutely sure you don't clip the highlights. Depending on the camera the settings on the histogram vary but remember that gone is gone - if you don't record the highlights there is no way to save them, raw format notwithstanding. Expose to the right as is recommended, but view all three colour channels and make sure that none are clipped. If your camera doesn't show all three colour historgrams then if you are recording very strong colours, then don't move the curve quite so far to the right (one channel may be clipped while the other two are not).

CF cards are easy to drop, smaller cards even more so - be especially careful when standing in places where you won't get the card back if you drop it. Film rolls tend to be easier to hang onto.

Consider card size - with the cost dropping it's tempting to simply get the biggest card you can afford - but even in raw, that could mean hundreds of images on one card. Cards do occasionally fail and I don't think you want all your eggs in one basket. My rule of thumb is to keep the number of images to under a hundred - the equivalent of 3 rolls of film.

Next time I'm going to talk about the frustrations of working with a computer instead of a darkroom - issues like storage and backup and dealing with less than perfect software.