Simple and to the point...
P.S. Great photography on your site too!
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Simple and to the point...
Everyone that shoots extensively has missed those great once in a blue moon opportunities . You have a 1000x more likely you will miss the peak action on the downhill skier ...than have a card failure . When I am not doing street photography ...I am shooting sports . Polo is the most challenging because you only get so many attacks on the goal and you have to guess when and where ..the establish focus on the eyes of the horse and hope that 10FPS is enough . Do I need to mention how critical AF “target acquisition “ and “tracking “ are to capturing a moment in sports ?Many use a card reader, so handling is a must unless your camera is connected to a computer. For me, that's not always convenient. It's not just weddings that require b/u. it's anything that you value as a photographer. For me, it could be changing light, an expression or simply a flick of the hair during a portrait shoot. I've done shoots with professional skiers going down 60 degree pitches in two feet of snow. I did one showcasing a skier against a panorama for a popular Winter clothing company. I can't switch cameras very easily in those situations if an SD card is corrupt. Nor do I want to carry the extra weight. Does Nikon, Canon or Leica assume a professional will just buy two identical cameras because of only one card slot? I hope not, especially with Leica! The popular method of holding SD cards in place for most cameras is the spring loaded "push to click in/push to remove." The spring in the camera can sometimes be the cause of not reading properly and not the SD card at all, so what then? If one is just starting out as a photography business, sometimes only one camera is the only option considering lenses, lights and expendables. So, for me, any camera with only one slot is not a professional tool. (yes, I love the Sony A7RII, but won't buy the A7RIII) but there's no good reason to leave them out. Yeah, I'm taking to you Nikon and Canon! Shooting film requires much less investment for b/u too. Digital has mucked all this up I also don't care how "tough" XQD or SD cards are either. So, I guess I answered my own question. Yes, two card slots are important because it's better to have it and not need it, then to need it and not have it.
Come on Ian ....two card slots are not ESSENTIAL . Look at the entire system when determining points where redundancy would improve the likely hood of success. Number One ....how many photographers are being assigned ..its 1000X more likely that you blew it ..than having a card failure . Number Two ....equipment ....100x more likely you would have an equipment failure than a card failure . Number Three ....in the film days I suppose the lab never blew it and ruined a shoot with bad chemicals or over processing .Putting the skills of the photographer aside - something can always go wrong (but rarely does).
Back in the day (film) when I worked as a pro, in the fields I worked in, almost nothing
could be re-shot if something had gone wrong.
I was paid to get a result and anything, and everything that I could do to ensure success
was employed - so yes if I were working today; two card slots would be essential to help me by offering a LITTLE peace of mind.
But sometimes things can be completely out of your control:
The amount of back-up I put together in order not to miss the shot below (taken some 33 years ago)
was something to behold ……… however - what I couldn't have bargained for was the fact that the person
at the other end of the radio failed to transmit to me the countdown to the truck being fired from the air-cannon.
The first thing I knew was seeing the truck in the air, but luckily I did capture the moment.
I did say a LITTLE peace up mind .....Come on Ian ....two card slots are not ESSENTIAL . Look at the entire system when determining points where redundancy would improve the likely hood of success. Number One ....how many photographers are being assigned ..its 1000X more likely that you blew it ..than having a card failure . Number Two ....equipment ....100x more likely you would have an equipment failure than a card failure . Number Three ....in the film days I suppose the lab never blew it and ruined a shoot with bad chemicals or over processing .
Sorry Ian its of course your decision .....my only point is that in the larger view of “risk of failure “ a bad card is extremely small . Understanding risk factors is critical to putting your effort, money etc into things that matter . As cards get better and more reliable (XQD verse CF) its questionable the risk of a card failure makes any meaningful difference .I did say a LITTLE peace up mind .....
"how many photographers are being assigned?" : Just me in that instance, I was the Stills Photographer on that movie.
"equipment failure" : As far as I remember the only equipment failures I had were due to my own carelessness,
but I always carried a suitable back-up for everything, however 99.9% of the time it was never needed.
"I suppose the lab never blew it and ruined a shoot?" : Yes, problems on two or three occasions out of the huge number of times
that labs processed my film, but I guarded against that extremely remote possibility by always shooting twice the number of sheets/rolls of film needed and holding back from the lab the second sheet/roll until the first had been safely couriered back to me and I had checked it.
So once again all that paranoia was unnecessary for 99.9% of the jobs, but for the 0.1% .........
So if I were still working; a camera with twice as many card slots that I needed, would for ME be an essential 0.tiny% part of my back-up arsenal.
Thinking back - the only piece of equipment that I didn't duplicate when on a shoot somewhere, was a second step ladder .
Agree.... and its always nice to have redundancy in your system .
Roger, I think this last sentence from your quote confirms the reason for two slots. Obviously, there's steps one can do to mitigate a potential card failure, charged battery, formatting and compatible cards, etc. But if you can approximate an average for card failures, then you certainly need two slots. I've had 2 Lexar cards that were unusable, but thankfully this wasn't while shooting. There's other factors that can fry a camera card and electronics and that's why I shoot film as a back up too.One additional point I might add .....the root cause of many card failures is inadequate battery power . When a battery runs downs and you are shooting a burst ...you may not have adequate power to complete writing the last frame to the card . When you create an incomplete write to a card you can destroy the index to the files it contains . That is why the recovery software can find files that seem to have been lost ..because it reads the card without relying on the index .
In my case 50% of my card failures were do to corrupt card indexes.
Ok ...not going to convince anyone here ....I have 170K images in my LR library taken with more than a dozen different cameras AND I HAVE NEVER MISSED An IMPORTANT SHOT OR LOST A FOLDER DUE TO CARD FAILURE . Wish I could say the same about my other points of failure !Roger, I think this last sentence from your quote confirms the reason for two slots. Obviously, there's steps one can do to mitigate a potential card failure, charged battery, formatting and compatible cards, etc. But if you can approximate an average for card failures, then you certainly need two slots. I've had 2 Lexar cards that were unusable, but thankfully this wasn't while shooting. There's other factors that can fry a camera card and electronics and that's why I shoot film as a back up too.