Two tales of two SD cards

The new Canon and Nikon mirrorless cameras only have one SD card slot. This is a major problem for professional photographers. I recently had two occasions when I was very thankful I had two slots in my Sony a9.

1) At a festival in the summer, my laptop died. And going along with it to IT heaven was a batch of photos I had just put on it. My workflow at festivals is to wipe my SD card 1 each time I emerge from the press tent having copied my last batch of photos to my computer. It saves me running out of memory in the middle of a shoot and it also prevents me wasting time duplicating images if I ingest the next day. Anyway, I'm confident about doing this because my Sony a9 saves every photo I take to two SD cards: once on slot 1 SD card, that I keep wiping after saving the photos, and the other, a larger card in slot 2, that I use as a backup and only remove when it's full. And on this occasion, I used that backup SD card to save all the photos that were lost on my laptop.

2) The other day I returned from shooting a wedding with not much time before I had to go off to a dinner where some of my photos were being exhibited and where I had said I would take some photos. I got home, took out my SD card to save the wedding photos and then, in a rush, left the house without putting the SD card back in the camera. Wanting to travel light, I just took my camera, without my bag with spare SD cards in it. So when I turned on my camera and tried to shoot, I got the message: No card in slot 1. My solution was to take out the card in slot 2 and use it. This situation was caused by my silly forgetfulness but that second slot was a life-saver. At a dinner where my photos were being celebrated by the gathered guests, I would have looked like a first-class turnip if I'd had to tell everyone my camera didn't work!