Although this probably isn't the most interesting article, it's an important one.
Capturing your wedding is a big responsibility, and one I take seriously. I'm forever grateful that you trust me to capture your wedding day for you and your family.
Given the importance of the moments I'm capturing, I have a host of measures in place to ensure your images are protected from the moment they're captured until you receive your final wedding gallery, and beyond.
Thankfully, I have never had to rely on any of these fallbacks, but nonetheless having multiple levels of protection is something I consider to be essential as a wedding photographer.
Keeping images safe from the moment they are captured
Keeping your images safe begins the moment I capture each image at your wedding. Each of my cameras is loaded with two memory cards, which capture duplicate "RAW" images. This means that if one card were to corrupt, the files would be safe on the other. I always carry spare cards at a wedding too, which means if one card were to corrupt, I can replace both cards so that the remaining copy of those images is kept safe until I transfer the files onto my laptop.
In addition, you'll notice that I always photograph weddings with two cameras, and I'm constantly using both. As well as enabling me to capture beautiful, complementary imagery with different lenses, this also means that if something were to happen to either of my cameras, images of those moments would also be present on the other. Essentially shooting with two cameras is another level of security for capturing such important moments.
After your wedding celebrations
The first thing I do when I get home from your wedding is back up your images. One memory card from each of my cameras is safely stored, whilst I transfer the files from the other onto an external hard drive.
Once the images are safely on my hard drive, I then upload a copy to my secure cloud storage. This means that there are three copies of your images safely stored in different locations and on different formats.
As you may have read elsewhere on my website, I spend the next eight weeks selecting and editing the images for your final gallery. Once your final wedding gallery is ready, these images are uploaded to your private online gallery and to my cloud storage, to again ensure there are multiple copies of these edited files for you.
This might seem like a lot of fail-safes, but wedding celebrations only happen once, and I'm privileged to capture moments that won't happen again. Therefore, taking precautions to ensure your images are protected is essential.