My Biggest Fear

I promise you I have had countless nightmares of this and they all end the same way: with me dying. Now the average nightmare may consists of continual falling or getting eaten by some monster or maybe even realizing you're naked in front of all of your friends and family; however, my nightmares all circle around one thing: forgetting my SD card.

I can't even count how many SD cards I have. I have read countless articles about how you should only keep a few SD cards so that after your photoshoots you are forced to download the photos then reformat the card, but for me, I can’t seem to buy enough of them. When I was in highschool my parents used to find my SD cards all over the house--I guess you could say I’m somewhat messy--they would then return them to my room, but there are the occasional stinkers that seemed to wander off into the depths of my room and haven’t been found to this day.

So if I have so many memory cards, then why am I so afraid of not bringing one to a photoshoot, you might ask. Well, let me tell you the story of my unfortunate life:

I had already begun my Senior Session timeframe and had about 6-8 shoots already finished and had many more scheduled ahead, so you would think I had a handle on being prepared: you would think wrong. Thankfully this photoshoot was of my sister and didn't end in total destruction; however, I will never forget the hole I felt in my stomach when we drove 2 hours to the location and I had realized my memory card wasn't in my camera.

Part of me wanted to cry and the other part of me wanted to scream. I couldn't believe that I could be this careless. So many questions were racing through my mind, “now what am I gonna do?”, “are we just going to drive all the way back home?”, “my parents are going to kill me!” I quickly snapped out of my despair and realized that we had passed a Walmart on the way to the location, thus we drove as fast as we could to purchase a memory card before the sun was completely down and had no more light to photograph in.

I think that the moral of this story is to show that even though there are obstacles that each photographer has to hurtle during their career, there are always solutions present. Maybe it includes a quick trip to Walmart, or maybe some duct tape to hold something together or maybe even borrowing a styrofoam cup because you forgot the diffuser for your flash. No matter what the problem may be, use your mind and be creative--that’s what your client is paying for you to do anyway.