It’s National Vanilla Milkshake Day. It’s all about celebrating the original vanilla milkshake. A vanilla shake is made by blending milk, ice cream, and vanilla flavoring for a classic style beverage.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Time moves in one direction, memory in another.—William Gibson
Once upon a time when I was testing a camera for the former print edition of Shutterbug, I ran into a memory card problem that was ultimately solved by using the camera itself as a card reader and connecting it to my computer via a cable and copying the image files onto my hard drive. While memory card failures do occur from time-to-time, in all my years of using different kinds of cards I’ve only had a few such occurrences and I’m pretty sure each time it was caused by user error.
Caption: HDR photographs seem to be out of fashion these days. Probably because too many people created images that were the photographic equivalent of paintings of Elvis on velvet. But it doesn’t have to look that way. This image of Balboa Park was created from a three-shot HDR bracket made with a tripod-mounted Canon EOS 5D Mark I with a nominal exposure of 1/25 sec at f/18 and ISO 200 using an EF 28-135mm lens. It was processed in HDR Efex, as I prefer, using more natural effects but using extensive slider play to tweak the image to create an idealized version of the original capture.
Here’s a few tips to avoid this happening to you:
Don’t remove the card when saving or viewing images. This seems as obvious as not sticking wet fingers in a light bulb socket but I’ve had to use Photo Rescue software to save images from a neighbor’s—the same neighbor—more than once who had a bad habit of doing just this.
When turning your camera on or off, don’t remove memory card. A corollary is don’t forcibly eject—without using your computer’s ‘safely remove media’ command or the Mac OS’ Eject command. The error messages you get by doing it the wrong way are more than a warning, they are a prediction of future damage.
Do not change your memory card when the camera is on. Yes I occasionally do this too so maybe that’s why the card in one of my misadventures bought the farm. While you can skate on some of these faux pas a time or two some of these bad habits are ultimately going to bite you in the butt.
Stop taking or viewing pictures when the battery is low. Flash memory has a limited number of write/erase cycles and electrons can get trapped where they’re not wanted and when voltage levels shift, it eventually causes read or write failure.
Sometimes these cards simply wear out. With newer, faster and cheaper cards now available, think about adding a few new cards from time to time and storing the others in some kind of card holder—I use the indestructible Pelican 0915 Memory Card Case —as as reserve.
Finally don’t be a cheapskate and purchase memory cards with the Crazy Charlie Flea Market brand name. Really good cards from really good companies are worth the pain and misery they help you avoid.
In the film processimg world there was an expression that certain rolls of film from certain individuals were CEV film—the roll contained images from Christmas, Easter and Vacation. Take the time to occasionally reformat your cards which can prevent them from becoming corrupted.
If you enjoy today’s blog post and would like to treat me to a small vanilla milk shake ($2.50), please click here. And if you do, thanks so much.