Idiotic Mistakes to Avoid When You're Learning Digital SLR Photography - Part II

1. Idiotic Mistake: You go on vacation and leave your battery charger on the other side of the world. When you are just seconds away from taking your best yet photograph, your batteries run out and you have to use your mom's 5 megapixel Canon Prosumer Camera instead of your own Canon Digital Rebel SLR.

What You Should Do: Don't assume "well, I moved everything over from my camera bag to my backpack, so it should all be in there." As ridiculous as it might sound, make a checklist of what photography equipment you need to bring with you. At least use it when you are traveling far away. Check your checklist when you pack and make sure you have everything.

2. Idiotic Mistake: You accidentally delete you files from your camera memory card before you have transferred the files to a computer or disk. Then you go right on using that same memory card to take other pictures! Which means you lose your chance of recovering your deleted files. The files on a memory card are recoverable. But once you have overwritten them with new files, recovery becomes impossible.

What You Should Do: Always carry extra memory cards with you. If you do accidentally delete your pictures, separate out the card with the deleted files and don't use it. Then find a good file undelete program (which you can find online) and recover your lost files. In many case you will be able to get them back. But only if you haven't overwritten them.

After you have succeeded at your data recovery, you can use your memory card again. I know a girl who violated point 1 above, and wound up having to take portrait photographs of her family, with a point-and-shoot mounted on a tripod. While her Digital SLR rested in its bag, uncharged, she cringed at the discolored shots (due to no white-balance control), difficult focus, unchangeable aperture, and fickle exposure. All because she left her charger in another continent.

I know a girl who violated rule point 2 above, and wound up returning to the mountains of a foreign country to re-shoot the lost photographs. Now, I won't tell you who this girl is. It would embarrass her. But suffice it to say that she is a girl who most people think of as being very smart. If it happened to her, it can happen to you too, so I hope you benefit from this advice.