I was reminded on one of my own rules to live by when it comes to principles of use of a digital camera when I put my Olympus C730UZ into the hands of my 9 year old, so while it was fresh in my mind I figured I’d relay some observations and opinions about some points to ponder.
1. Spend plenty on large denominations of storage media whether CF, SD, MS or xD. Read on for the reasons. A corollary to that is buy plenty of rechargeable batteries. If your camera uses a proprietary battery buy at
least a second one and keep it charged/rotated.
2. Always shoot in the highest quality/resolution JPEG possible (native resolution, not interpolated as some cameras have, that’s a farce), or RAW if you have a DSLR and will be using an advanced workflow that handles RAW well (Aperture, Lightroom, Photoshop, or asset management.)
Because… You never know how timeless, unique or otherwise valuable the images that you (or your family) capture may be. You can always throw them away after the shoot if you determine otherwise, which is a parallel to point #3. If the only purpose for your images will be 4X6 prints, maybe you can ignore that point… Maybe.
3. SHOOT! When in doubt, shoot! The only real soft expense involved in shooting more than less is the potential time it may take to wade through the images after the shoot. The main hardware expense involved in this philosophy is a one-time investment in larger media than you maybe would buy if you were far more conservative (…and hard drive space.) For just around the house use, not factoring in trips or remote events, you can probably do fine on 256MB. But the second you walk out that door, the thing you have to realize is, you can’t go to the corner gas station and buy a roll of “film” (but you can go to WalMart and buy more media 
, so you have to plan ahead and make sure you’ll have enough media to capture the event or trip. Which leads to point #4.
4. Keep your media cleared off. Don’t leave images on your card for months or even weeks. This does 2 things; helps you properly file or tag your images when you import them because the event is only a few days or a week old and you’re less likely to look at an image and have no clue what it is. The other thing it does is help you get the most mileage possible out of the media you
do own because you will most likely have all the space available when you go to that event.
5. Backup your images on CD and some other form of live media i.e. a secondary and/or dedicated hard drive (besides wherever you have your primary library stored) or website or something, CDs are not reliable as the sole backup of your life images – do not trust them. They may make a fair off-site backup, which is another strategy to seriously consider – storing at least CDs of your library at a family members house. With the cost of media, it’s very affordable to (and inexcusable to not:) have off-site backups, which means unless your entire town is struck by a natural disaster, you should have something to fall back on if a major catastrophe befalls your dwelling.
6. Keep the time and date set correctly on your camera. Metadata is only good if it’s accurate. When is as important to me as what and where. If you are using rechargeable AA’s this is a real factor to stay on top of. If I don’t use my C730UZ within 7-10 days, those NiMH batts are prone to running dead on me and then my clock is reset and I’ve added another 50 images with the date of 01/01/00 and time of 12:00 am.
