I had a white seamless shoot on Saturday for ten 16 year olds girls. That's a scary thought, but they were all fantastic and took posing instructions really well. Unfortunately, my SD card didn't have such an easy night.
I've been shooting in 14 bit lately, so memory cards fill up much faster. I'll need to get round to doing a 12 & 14 bit test, as I'm not sure I see that much of a difference in quality, but the file sizes with the later are so much larger. I was shooting with a D300s, the 35mm 1.4G for full body and the 85mm 1.4G for portraits (50mm & 128mm in full frame terms). Due to the 14 bit, I maxed out 8 gigabytes about three quarters of the way through the shoot. I removed the CF and SD cards from their slots and swapped the CF with the empty one in my D300, knowing that the card wouldn't get lost if it was inside a camera. I slipped the SD card into a thin compartment in my bag where I keep my light meter and ColorChecker Passport. I don't know if the damage was done when the card went in or when I took it back out at home, but as you can see from the photo above, the dividers between the contacts have been ripped up. I could put it in the camera or a card reader to see if it still works, but even if it did, I would never trust it, because you just know it would fail at the worst possible time, or even worse, damage a camera.
I was lucky in a way though, as the SD card was set to record a back-up, with the CF card getting the original RAW files. So £50 down the drain, but it could have been worse. I've now ordered two 8gb Class 10 SCHC cards, one for the Nikon and one for the soon to be delivered Fujifilm X-Pro1. I'd like to move to a D700 for the full frame sensor, but only having one card slot scares me! So I'll take CF cards over SD cards any day of the week. CF's are built like tanks. They're for real men...manly men!