Easy Tip to Avoid Accidently Erasing Memory Cards

[by Richard Harrington]

©Richard Harrington

I have a tendency to carry a lot (and I mean A LOT) of memory cards on a shoot.  Between shooting panoramic photos, time-lapse sequences, and HD video, I burn through memory cards faster than most.  I find myself needing to be certain that I avoid accidentally erasing data.

Here’s my strategy for safety:

1. Make sure that all memory cards are erased BEFORE going into the field.  Don’t bring cards with data or you’ll sit there wondering if you transferred them already or if you’re about to wipe your only copy.
2. Have two card wallets.  One full and one empty.  Make sure they have the same number of slots.
3. Put the full wallet with all of the blank memory cards into your right pocket.
4. Put the empty wallet with no cards in it in your left pocket.
5. As you shoot cards, place them upside down in the card wallet in your left pocket.
6. Repeat this phrase ten times… The cards in the right pocket are the right cards to shoot with; the cards in my left pocket should be left alone.

I know it’s simplistic…  but it’s saved me more than one time.  Give it a shot.

Richard Harrington is the founder of RHED Pixel, a visual communications company in Washington, D.C. You can read Rich’s blog at www.RichardHarringtonBlog.com as well as follow him on Twitter @rhedpixel. To learn more about time-lapse, HDR, and panoramic photography, explore www.3Exposure.com. If you’d like to check out his books, just swing by his Amazon page.

It’s Easy: Use Apps to Support Your Marketing Wake-Up Callalls.

[by Carolyn Potts]

There are two apps that can keep you from falling asleep at the wheel on the road to your photo marketing success: Evernote and  iCal. When used in conjunction, they’re even more powerful.

1. Good content always comes first. Evernote is a great app to capture portfolio shoot ideas as they come to you; great ideas can happen anywhere, anytime. Don’t let them slip away. Rope and tie ‘em.

2. Then use iCal’s reminder function to actually schedule your portfolio shoots. Commit to scheduling a minimum of 6-12 new images per year. Put them on your calendar now even if you don’t have the actual idea fleshed out yet. Create deadlines with multiple alarms for every aspect of the shoot.

3.Use Evernote again to capture any promotional ideas, leads, and resources that inspire you about marketing. Use the Tags feature.

4. Then schedule action steps related to your marketing ideas into your calendar. Use more alarms. Move a task to the next hour–or the next day– if you don’t complete the task on time. Keep the alarm active until the project is totally complete. Getting sick of hearing the alarm go off can be a powerful motivator. And it will create new habits.

5. Finally… schedule a victory reward for the work you’ve done to support your creativity and your intention to move your marketing forward.
Don’t skip this step!

Carolyn Potts, photography marketing consultant, former photo rep, and compassionate butt-kicker, shows photographers how to get more work. Although, only 3 alarms were needed to write this article, there are several more alarms to go before her new website launches. In the mean time, find her at www.cpotts.com , http://bit.ly/FaceBookPottsConsulting and http://carolynpotts.net.

The Frequent Writer’s Secret Weapon

[by Colleen Wainwright]

I measure the usefulness of any piece of software on my computer by how much I miss it when using someone else’s machine.

By that measure, easily the greatest item I’ve ever bought has been the text storage and expansion utility for the Mac, TextExpander. (Full disclosure: four years after becoming a rabid, vocal, and paid user of TextExpander, the company hired me to do some consulting work for them last year.)

At its most basic, TextExpander stores snippets of text (or pictures!) which you can then easily insert on the fly with user-defined shortcuts. Thus, it’s great for storing all kinds of boilerplate text–email signatures, telephone numbers and addresses, replies to frequently-asked questions, URLs, HTML code, etc. Pretty much anything you find yourself typing over and over again is fair game for getting turned into a TextExpander snippet.

There are also a number of incredibly useful snippet groups that come either come standard (time/date stamps, frequently misspelled words) or that fans have created and shared (accented words, keyboard symbols, etc.). Without even getting into advanced features (there are some fancy things you can do with creating forms and having the cursor move around automagically), I’ve saved close to 40 hours in four years thanks to TextExpander. (And yes, the statistics counter is probably my favorite feature of all.)

The #1 rule of lifehacking says that when you find yourself repeating monotonous tasks, find a way to automate. The #1 rule of TextExpander is when you find yourself on a computer without it, get back to your own rig, pronto.

Colleen Wainwright lives for finding creative ways to save time and energy, which she then uses to fuel her ASMP chapter talks on Making People Love You Madly.

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