I'm an idiot, what to do?

So, I am shooting a race tomorrow and have left my memory card at home! I have 2x 128mb's in my bag, do I just stick it on Medium quality and hope no-one asks for prints?! I guess this has happened to everyone at least once!

Adam T wrote:
So, I am shooting a race tomorrow and have left my memory card at home! I have 2x 128mb's in my bag, do I just stick it on Medium quality and hope no-one asks for prints?! I guess this has happened to everyone at least once!

Use your "plastic" money and get another big card or two. Keep your spares in the camera case just in case you leave one in the reader at home again. Been there, done that, but was saved by the spares.

I went through almost 3 gigs worth of card space shooting a "soapbox derby" race (non-powered cars going downhill with kids at the wheel) last weekend.

Can't get anywhere to buy a new card by tomorrow, plus...16 year olds can't use plastic money unfortunately!

Do you think I will be OK to shoot on Small?

That all depends on your intended use for the photos.

You can also take time between shots to cull out the not-so-good shots and erase them from the card to allow more space for better shots. Being a little more fussy about what constitutes a good photo opportunity will help too.

In my opinion, one or two superb shots done in max resolution would be far better than a card full of mediocre shots.

Shoot those few superb shots in RAW mode so that you can easily tweak white balance, etc., after the fact to make the superb shots even better.

Make sure you do a really careful job of controlling your exposures, framing, etc.

This could just be a fantastic learning experience/challenge.

Adam T,
If you plan to print any of your photos larger than 4" x 6" then I suggest you take less at higher jpg resolutions. If you plan to use your photos for web, screen display or just 4" x 6" prints (ex. on my 10D jpegs at the smallest are 1536 x 1024px) then set a small jpg and you should be ok

i shot some wedding shots on MED and they turned out fine on 8x10.

That's because your Magically Delicious...LOL.. sorry, just had to do it.....

Go get another CF card! If you get one or two 1gig cards, it shouldn't be very expensive. Here in the US 1g cards can easily be found for ~ $50. There's no downside - you'll use them. I have 4 1g and a couple of 4g microdrives. They ALL get used!

No offense, but wouldn't a small jpeg out of a D60 be very tiny? It'd probably make an alright 8x10, though, it would seem. 5x7 for sure. Well...at 300 dpi, I don't know.

Ok, disregard this response. I have no idea what I'm talking about.

If you don't have a choice, what choice do you have? That didn't make any sense either. Shoot small with your 128 cards and pray they turn out. That really isn't very much memory, is it?

Just be REALLY selective before you take pictures. Also, you won't be able to snap of 3-4 really fast. Take your time, and wait for good pictures just waiting to be snapped... OR, hope you can find someone with one you can borrow.

I have a Tamrack strap that has a small pouch on each side for a CF card. It's saved me the time or two that I have left my card in the reader.

One 256 card. I could get probably 30 large jpegs from my 5D on there, so multiply that twice, and twice again for size (s), and I'd say you're looking at 80-100 shots, no? 6mp, right?

Should be about right. My 300d with my 512mb card told me I could get about 155 Jpegs, so figure about 75 or so for 256mb. That really should be enough. When I started off I couldn't fill my 512mb card... Now it takes no time at all...

Find someone there shooting with Nikon and grab a couple out of his bag while he's not looking.

Seriously, though, try medium/fine. On my 300D, it shows I can get about 260 images on my 512MB card. Divide by 2 and you've got 130 good shots available. Keep ISO low, backgrounds clean, and you can push that number even further.

Remember, trees, crowds of people and other such complicated stuff, especially in focus or nearly so, will cause JPEG sizes to shoot up dramatically. For example, I took a sample directory full of miscellaneous photos and compared largest to smallest file sizes. The smallest file size (all were large/fine JPGs) was almost 1/4th of the largest. When I looked at the smallest file, it was a picture of something that was in focus in the foreground and a very small DOF, which means the majority of the picture was out of focus. The largest, at almost 6 megs, was a picture of my truck in the woods, with a fairly large DOF (most everything was in focus). All those in-focus trees really drove up the byte count.

^^^ Cool info on the byte count. I knew things were different sizes but never stopped to figure out why.

Don't forget that you can delete shots, just because you take it doesn't mean you are stuck. The wonder of digital...

As was mentioned, just be more picky on what you shoot. It may be a blessing in disguise - you'll really have to pay attention to what you shoot and may end up doing some more learning.