Photographers love to go on and on about what gear they use, and why they made that choice. One topic that I hear covered ad nauseum is the size of their flash memory cards. Bigger is better, right? Not necessarily, it seems. Many photographers love to argue that using 1 really large flash card is just like putting all your eggs in one basket. That is, if a CF or SD card goes bad, you could potentially lose a lot more of your images than if you had used multiple smaller cards instead.

While that logic seems perfectly reasonable, I take another line of thought on this one.

I’ve made many thousands of images over the years, and I’ve never had a card go bad. Don’t get me wrong, I know that these things are a lot like hard disk drives and that statistically they WILL eventually fail. But that hasn’t happened to me yet. So while I am careful with my cards, and I am definitely concerned about one of them going bad and corrupting my files, I don’t think that it’s the most likely way that I will lose my images.

I have physically lost many pieces of photography gear over the years, including a couple of very expensive CompactFlash cards. So for me, the far more likely way that I would lose images would be to lose or misplace a full card after I changed it out for an empty one.

For me, this choice is easy. I use the biggest and fastest memory cards I can afford. Currently that means Lexar 8 GB 300x CompactFlash
cards, but I plan to upgrade to 16 GB cards soon. I also have some older SanDisk Ultra II cards and I’ve never had an issue with any of them or with any of my Lexar cards.

Am I putting all my eggs in one basket? Maybe, but for me that makes more sense than having a bunch of smaller cards that are difficult to manage and keep track of.

What about you? One big card, or several smaller cards?

I get asked all the time to recommend some good books for new photographers wanting to learn how to be a better shooter. This is very easy for me to do since I have literally read dozens of photography books over the last couple of years. In my mind there is no doubt that every beginner photographer (and even some that are more seasoned in the craft) should read two books: “The Digital Photography Book” by Scott Kelby and “Understanding Exposure” by Bryan Peterson.

“The Digital Photography Book” is a very quick and easy read. It is written in a very simplistic format with the idea being that if you were to ask the author how to make a particular shot in a given situation, he would tell how to do it in a simple and straightforward answer. Not a ton of theory, just a simple “do it like this” kind of answer. This book is actually the first in a series of three books (the 3rd is coming out soon), each of which continues from where the previous one left off and gets progressively more advanced. Kelby is a prolific author and the reason fo his huge success is that his books are very easy to read while still being extremely useful. This is a must read for all new photographers.

“Understanding Exposure” is a classic. It’s actually somewhat out of date since it was written before digital cameras were common, and therefore makes very little reference to ISO, but that hardly matters given the rest of the content. It is an excellent guide to getting the right exposure using the basic creative controls within the camera, while also discussing creativity and composition. Almost everyone that reads this book immediately feels that they have become a better photographer. It’s as simple as that. Read it.