On the subject of 'killing' flash cards/SD cards there is one thing that you must always do to prevent problems. Always, repeat always turn the camera off and if there is a card access light wait until it goes out before you remove the card. This applies whether you have just taken a photo or not. If the card is busy writing when you pop it then there is a distinct possibility that you will cause corruption. This may be as minor as a picture being incomplete or it may render the card unreadable.

Under normal conditions you will be able to re-format the card and all should be OK, although you will of course lose any pictures that were on the card. There is the possibility, remote though it may be, that if the card is actually performing housekeeping tasks at the time it is popped it could end up trashed.

We see this about 10 to 20 times a year with one of our big customers who has 10,000 hand-held computers. The users are told not to open them up but we have monitoring software that shows us some of them do, with the occasional end result of a trashed SD card.

I'm afraid it is nothing to do with modern cards/readers being better than older models, the reason for damage when inserting cards is twofold. One is the obvious contact wear that occurs every time the contacts make and break. However the worse problem is the chance, small though it may be, that the card will be inserted incorrectly and bend the contacts. If this happens on the card reader no problem, just buy a new reader. If it happens on the camera that can be a different story altogether. I wouldn't like to try repairing the contacts on my Nikon and I'm not sure if it would be covered under the warranty.
Small though these chances are I would rather not take them for what comes down to waiting a few seconds more while it transfers via USB, and the tiny amount of extra drain on the batteries. Even for Nikon, who are not shy when it comes to eye-watering prices, a new battery is only £50, and I have done a rough calculation which shows that I will probably shorten my battery life from 500,000 pictures (to 75% of new capacity) to about 450,000 pictures.
I think that this is one of those topics where there are two schools of thought and each camp is a devoted follower of their method. And long may it be so! I would hate to live in a society where everyone thought the same :-D

A further thought re deleting on the camera vs. downloading everything. Hard disk space is so cheap now why not keep everything? If you use some sort of cataloguing software you can just tag any poor shots as such and they don't appear. They are still there on the computer though so if for some reason you do want to look at them you can pull them up again. OK, I can hear you say, Why would I want to do that? Well I'm sure we have all seen the demo of the Adobe software addition to Photoshop which can remove camera shake? That can take what was a pretty poor image and bring it back to life. And what does the future hold? If you don't have the picture you can't re-process it. Personally I never erase anything other than the ones where I accidentally shot with the totally wrong settings and it is either totally black or totally white. Anything else is on there somewhere just waiting for the day when Adobe find a way to recover it! :-D

There is of course a third option for transferring files which doesn't require any plugging in or card removal and that is to use an EyeFi card. They are reasonably inexpensive and if you set them up correctly they don't drain the battery when not in use.

I use mine in my D7000 in combination with my iPad. You can take a picture and save the RAW file to the SD card in slot one and save a JPG file to the EyeFi card in slot two. About 5 seconds later it appears on the screen on the iPad. That can be really handy if you are doing a shoot for a client when you can give them the iPad so they can see what each shot will look like without waiting for them to be transferred to the PC.

I would vote for tethering via USB every time. Most cameras and computers can use USB2 so it doesn't take a lot longer to transfer than it would by removing the card and inserting it into a card reader. It does however remove the need to take the card out of the camera and put it back in again. Every time you do that you increase the wear on the card mechanism, and don't forget the ever present opportunity to damage the connector inside the camera. As has been previously stated this could be very expensive to repair.

Ah! Mamma don't take my Kodachrome away!

Steve40
Thanks for the info. I will have a look to see if they are available over here. A damn site cheaper at $6 for four if I can track them down.

Oh, and by the way, further to my post about using a gel on the lights, if you have a theatre nearby you could try buttering up one of the techies for some gel off-cuts. Most theatres go through huge quantities of gels which they use on the lighting rigs and as they usually buy them in large sheets they may have left over bits, or indeed even sheet they don't want. I got about 300 gels of all different colours from my local theatre. Mind they had me help them set out about 50 seats for a jazz performance that evening but it was a sweet deal. :-D

Steve40:
Do you happen to know what make/model they were? Could be they are available here if you know where to look. Last ones I bought were £20 (about $30) each for 5500K 40Watt bulbs.

Steve40

That sounds good. You need to make sure that they are 'photographic' daylight and not just those ones that simulate daylight for office use but have some rather nasty dips and peaks in the colour spectrum. I got caught like that a while back which is why I prefer incandescent lamps, even though the heat can be a problem. For some reason the genuine daylight florescent bulbs are quite expensive on this side of the pond.

GoofyNewfie:

Ah, yes. England and America are two countries separated by a common language. ( George Bernard Shaw ) :-)

Also remember that if you are using daylight as well as using things like anglepoise lamps for additional lighting that you need to set your white balance to daylight and place a blue filter over the lights. Otherwise you will have a devil of a time getting the white balance right with mixed light sources. I bought some sheets of photo gel which I use, they were quite cheap and make it so much easier to get the colours right.

The EyeFi card can transfer you shots to the iPad as you take them and the basic model is quite cheap. Only works if your camera takes SD cards though. It works by sending the files by wireless so you don't actually need a cable to tether. Check out the webste www.eyefi.com to see if it will work with your camera.

I have just been told by the guy in my local camera shop that there is going to be a delay in camera and lens releases due to the flooding in that part of the world. He had been told that Nikon had at least one of their factories still under water.
Has anyone else heard this or was he just blowing smoke?

I also think that some people are missing the point in that for some of us photography is what we do for fun. And a big part of that fun is playing around. Changing things. Seeing what happens when we do this or that.

Taking a superb picture which is perfectly lit, beautifully framed and with the focus just right is sweet. Magic even. But I have spent many happy hours 'rescuing' a picture which had potential but was lacking something. Perhaps there was a wrong shadow, or an unbalancing post or power line. To be able to take that picture and work the old magic on it with the likes of PhotoShop or whatever has given me many a happy evening.

And it's not just in the digital realm either. I remember evenings spent in the darkroom with a blob of cotton-wool on the end of a popsicle stick as I dodged an overexposed face. The only difference now is the absence of the smell of Hypo!