How One Tiny Oversight Can Cost You Hours After the Shoot

A photo shoot can go sideways because of one tiny setting, one missing card, or one piece of gear that shifted in the bag. If paid work or once-only moments matter, a tight pre-shoot checklist is less about being obsessive and more about avoiding preventable damage.

Coming to you from David Bergman with Adorama, this practical video lays out Bergman’s on-location checklist that happens right before shooting starts. He skips the big pre-planning items and stays locked on the small misses that sting later, especially when switching between two camera bodies. One of his first points is syncing time and date across cameras so files sort cleanly when you ingest them, which is easy to ignore until you are trying to match a key moment across two lenses. He also flags the basic failure you only need once to remember: forgetting to reinsert an SD card or a CFexpress card after dumping files. Then he gets blunt about formatting cards in-camera only after backups exist in multiple places, which keeps you from “cleaning” a card that still holds the only copy.

The middle of the checklist is where most people get burned, because it’s not glamorous and it’s rarely obvious in the moment. Bergman talks about checking every camera battery and anything else you rely on, including a flash, even if you charged everything earlier. He also calls out a sneaky physical issue: a bumped lens hood that ends up slightly rotated, creating heavy corner shading you might not notice until editing. His fix is simple, using small pieces of gaffer's tape to keep the hood from drifting, but he treats the tape itself like a consumable that loses stick and needs replacement. He adds quick cleaning checks for lens glass and the viewfinder, not because it changes image quality in the viewfinder, but because a dirty viewfinder slows you down when timing is tight.

Then Bergman switches to settings that quietly carry over from yesterday’s job and sabotage today’s. He pushes you to verify you are shooting raw if that’s your default, because accidentally shooting JPEG-only is the kind of mistake that can’t be undone later. He runs through exposure compensation and flash exposure compensation, since either can get nudged without you noticing, and he includes crop mode so you don’t spend half a shoot wondering why everything feels tighter than expected. He also brings up shutter mode choices (electronic versus mechanical) and drive mode, with an example of accidentally shooting at 30 frames per second on a silent shutter and ending up with more than 8,000 frames to review. There’s also a smart phone tip for any event coverage: keep critical notes instantly accessible, like a set list or roster, by putting it where you can see it fast without hunting through apps. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Bergman.