Lost
A message landed in my WhatsApp the other day. A photographer had lost their memory card at an event in Dubai. A card full of work, gone. If you attended, please keep an eye out. Please DM me if you hear anything.
I felt that one in my gut.
Because losing a card isn't losing a card. It's losing the shoot. The hours. The thing the client is waiting for. The version of a moment that only exists because you were there to catch it. You can't reshoot a fashion show. You can't ask the light to happen again. Once it's gone, it's gone, and no amount of skill or reputation buys it back.
It got me thinking about how little we talk about what happens after the shutter stops. We obsess over gear, over light, over the edit. But the workflow — the boring, unglamorous business of not losing the thing we just made — barely gets a mention.
And yet it's the part that decides whether the work survives.
So here's mine. Not as a lecture. Not as a finger pointed at anyone who's ever lost a card, because that could be any of us on the wrong day. Just what I've learnt, mostly the hard way.
The moment I'm home, everything comes off the card. Onto the computer, onto a backup drive, up to the cloud. I don't sort it. I don't cull it. I don't even really look at it. I just get it off the card and into two other places before I let myself do anything else. The sorting can wait. The safety can't.
Both my cameras write to two cards at once. Every frame, twice, in the same instant. Not every camera can do this, and I know it's a luxury — but if yours has the option buried in a menu somewhere, turn it on. It costs you nothing and it means the card sitting in your bag was never the only copy of anything.
If I'm shooting more than one event in a day, I swap the working card out and tuck it into a holder — while the backup card quietly keeps everything anyway. Two systems, doing the same job, so that neither one failing ruins the day.
And then two small things almost nobody bothers with. Put your initials on every card. And drop a plain text file with your contact details onto the card itself. Because here's the thing — cards don't usually get stolen. They get picked up. They fall out of a bag, they get left on a table, someone pockets one by accident in the scrum of a media pen. And if I found yours, sitting there anonymous among a hundred identical black rectangles, how would I ever know it was yours? How would I get it back to you? The initials and the text file cost you thirty seconds and they turn a lost card into a returnable one.
None of this is clever. That's the point. There's no craft in it, no artistry, nothing you'd ever put in a portfolio. The work we're most afraid to lose is protected by the most forgettable habits we own. The dull stuff. The stuff we skip because we're tired, because the shoot went well, because surely just this once it'll be fine.
I still felt that photographer's panic in my gut when I read the message. That cold drop. And maybe that feeling is the real backup — the fear that makes you build the habits before the day you need them, instead of the day after.