Imagine this, “I don’t have any wedding photos.” she told me. “She took pictures all day and at the end of the day she opened her camera and saw that she didn’t have a memory card in the camera.”

This is a real story told to me by the bride some three years after the wedding. A simple mistake by an inexperienced wedding photographer cost this bride her photos.

There are a lot of things that could have happened - all with the same sorry result. There could have been a memory card in the camera that was defective. Or she could have lost that card on the way home. Or the photographer could have had her computer crash shortly after loading the wedding photos. And there are others, experienced by real people all with the same tragic result. No wedding photos.

Here’s how we protect your photos.

1) I shoot every wedding with two cameras. I do this for a few reasons but one of them is - cameras fail or get dropped and break. If I have two, I can keep shooting. Professional cameras are complex. If something is wrong in the middle of a wedding, I don’t have time to figure it out. With two cameras, I can afford to figure it out later and that way, not miss a single moment of your wedding.

2) Each one of the cameras you see in the above photo is programmed in such a way that the shutter will not work if there are no memory cards in the camera. In other words, I could not possibly make the mistake that the inexperienced photographer made.

3) Each one of those cameras in the photo above has two memory cards. One backs up the other in case one of the cards fails in the middle of your wedding - and yes, I have actually had a card fail in the middle of a wedding without losing a single photo.

4) As soon as I get home from the wedding I upload your photos to my hard drive, which now gives me 3 copies of your photos. Once they are on the hard drive they are automatically backed up to the cloud. And the cloud service backs up all of their servers.

Once all of that is done, I do reuse the original memory cards, but by now the chance of losing your photos has dropped very far below 1%.

The precautions I take to preserve your memories make it as close to impossible to lose them as it is possible to do.

The chances are that if you hire a photographer that does not take these measures, everything will be fine. Wedding photos usually aren’t lost. But do you want to be the unlucky one? Or do you want to make sure nothing bad happens with your photos?

When you are considering hiring a professional photographer, make this one of your questions. What precautions do you take to make sure my photos are safe? Then compare their answer to my list above.