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(When I shoot sports, my cards rarely reach 80 to 90 percent of capacity before I change
them.) Using multiple smaller cards means you have to change them that more often,
which can be a real pain when you’re taking a lot of photos. As an example, if you use
1GB memory cards with a Nikon D7000 and shoot RAW+JPEG FINE, you may get
only a few dozen pictures on the card. That’s not even twice the capacity of a 36-expo-
sure roll of film (remember those?). In my book, I prefer keeping all my eggs in one bas-
ket, and then making very sure that nothing happens to that basket.
Preventive Measures
Here are some options for preventing loss of valuable images:
■ Interleaving. One option is to interleave your shots. Say you don’t shoot weddings,
but you do go on vacation from time to time. Take 50 or so pictures on one card,
or whatever number of images might fill about 25 percent of its capacity. Then,
replace it with a different card and shoot about 25 percent of that card’s available
space. Repeat these steps with diligence (you’d have to be determined to go through
this inconvenience), and, if you use four or more memory cards you’ll find your
pictures from each location scattered among the different memory cards. If you lose
or damage one, you’ll still have some pictures from all the various stops on your trip
on the other cards. That’s more work than I like to do (I usually tote around a
portable hard disk and copy the files to the drive as I go), but it’s an option.
■ In-camera backup. Fortunately, if you own a Nikon D7000, you don’t need to
restrict yourself to a single basket. Load your camera with two Secure Digital cards,
then go to the Shooting menu and set Role Played by Card in Slot 2 to Backup, so
that each shot you take is copied to both cards simultaneously. This will slow down
your maximum shooting speed significantly (don’t try this backup method when
shooting sports), but for ordinary photography, this provides the peace of mind of
knowing you’re making a spare copy of each image right on the spot.
Chapter 14 ■ Nikon D7000: Troubleshooting and Prevention 471
EXTREME BACKUP
I probably took the dual-card technique to the extreme recently while on a trip. I had my
D7000 stocked with a pair of 32GB cards, and was shooting in RAW+JPEG mode. I
happened to be shooting three-exposure brackets, which I was going to process as HDR
(high dynamic range) photos. With the camera set to copy to both cards at the same
time, and using Continuous high, every time I pressed the shutter release, the D7000
took a three-shot set in both RAW+JPEG Fine (six pictures) and copied them to both
cards (12 files in all). That was 218MB of images per shot! I managed the dubious feat of
filling up 64GB of memory cards while pressing the shutter release fewer than 300 times.