Photographer nighmares

As I'm setting up my business here, I am making ends meet by assisting and second shooting for other photographers. It's a pretty common practice for photographers. There are a few photographers that I am a regular shooter for. One of them, named Tim, I had a gig with last Saturday night. While I was not personally hurt during this shoot, it did teach me a lot about what can go wrong in the business.

Tim had both his cameras stolen right before the ceremony. Not only were the pictures on there from the day (getting ready, formal portraits, family portraits...) but this was about $12,000 worth of equipment. The next day, my friend Gizela had both her computer, and her external hard drive crash. Backup, backup, backup.

All this goes to show that Murphy, and his laws are alive and well. The lessons I learned were 1) for sure, get everything insured, and write down allll serial codes off of the equipment. and 2) (as I said before) backup, backup, backup. I recommend the book "The DAM Book" by Peter Krogh, a very comprehensive book for keeping Murphey and his cronies from wreaking too much havoc. Just remember the 3-2-1 sysytem: have THREE copies of every file, on TWO different types of media (ie hardrive, CD, etc), and ONE of them offsite (in case of natural disaster, fire etc).

As for getting your gear stolen, I'm sure there are a hundred different ways to avoid this pitfall besides becoming a hunchback while carrying every piece of equipment you bring on your back. One of the easiest ways I suspect would be to hire some high school kid, to just chill next to your stuff the whole time. 50 bucks to do nothing but babysit inanimate objects... not too shabby. Other than that, leave me some comments. I'd love to hear what you do to PYA on shoots.