Recently read an article on 7 Bad Habits of Photographers and left a comment. A number of people criticized the points of the article for being simplistic and obvious. One even suggested the article should have been named "7 Bad Habits of Amateur Photographers." However, even experienced photographers still forget or take for granted basic things as well as all of mankind for that matter. So in that light and inspired particularly by point 1 of that article - forgetting to put things back in gear bag, I've decided to list the things even experienced photographers forget before heading out to photog.
- Batteries: You come home from shooting an event for several hours. You take out the battery or batteries and start charging at home while putting your bag elsewhere. Next day or two, you are in a hurry, grab your bag and head out to discover you forgot to go into the other room and grab the batteries.
- Battery Charger: You remember to put the batteries back in the bag or camera but lazily leave the battery charger out or you are shooting an all day event and keep the charger plugged in so you can come back to re-charge batteries and at the end of the day, get caught up in talking to people that you just walk out with them and forget to get the charger. This happens to me as I will otherwise have my gear bags with me while having my battery charger plugged in a back room.
- Computer / Laptop Power Adapter: Many professional photographers, including me, take a computer with them on site to immediately off load and process shots or review shots on a big screen instead of a tiny LCD. I grab my laptop to take with me to a shoot, detach the power cable which falls to the floor along with the mess of wires by my computer desk, and then after putting my computer into the laptop bag (hey, it's still a bag), get distracted and forget to go back and pull out and wrap up the power adapter. This happened so often that I brought a second power adapter that I keep in my laptop bag. One of the best investments I made.
- Compact Flash: You take them out. You put them in your card reader attached to your computer and you leave them in the reader or if you do stacks at a time, like I do, then you end up leaving on the desk or table by your computer. Because I have over a half dozen cards, I usually can get by forgetting a card here and there. However, one time I grab my bag and went out for a three hour shoot at three different sites and realized I had only one of my eight cards with me.
- Business cards: If you've read my number one tip on how to become a photographer, working and paid, then you know how important it is to always have these in your bag, even if you are out shooting for fun for yourself.
- Pen / Marker and Notebook: Often comes in handy at a shoot to write down notes and get names and numbers. Often, I will be at a shoot and I will be the only one with a pen, marker, note paper handy. At concert gigs, be very careful of loaning out as you often won't get back.
- Ear Plugs: Not an issue for non-concert photographers, but for me, this is the number one thing I forget as well as often lose because I end up stuffing in my pockets or taking off and setting down instead of immediately putting back into my gear bag.
Fortunately, I've never missed out on a gig because of these things, but have had to make drives to get what I left behind or had to work under extra stress and change my normal shooting style as I had to do the time I only had 1 of my eight cards with me.
