As a photography assistant, I have:

Driven the car.

Unloaded and set up gear.

Driven to Home Depot to buy decor.

Inventory/charge/empty/dump batteries and memory cards before and after shoots to make sure we never have a chance of running out of anything or losing data.

Book travel plans and rental gear.

Answered questions from clients, collected payments/deposits, fended off botherers

Ordered the food.

Dumped and organized the files.

Ensured backups are running.

Waved meat and cheese in front of subjects.

Etc.

Z:\year\month\date - client\

Super simple and easy to find old stuff, even with literally millions of files. Current year stored locally, past years on NAS, all backed up.

Fuji GFX and Canon RF shooter, both since early 2021, never been an issue. I don’t change lenses too often but I’m not exactly in a clean-room when I do.

Dinner was delicious, you must have an amazing oven.

Fuji GFX 110mm f/2

I’m a heavy pro user and I’ve had maybe two cards actually fail in 15 years. But the first time it mattered (thankfully not the second).

I shoot about 100k photos a year but I also have way more cards than I need. I think I currently have 10x256GB SD cards, and 4x512GB CFExpress cards. So the wear is fairly spread out. I also only buy good cards, and always shoot to dual cards. I switched from CF to SD around 2020, which meant all new cards, and have slowly used more CFE cards since then too (first my R5 and now the new GFX). Meaning I’m not using anything ancient.

My workflow assumes cards will always fail, but I never actually worry about it.

Astro stuff and nowhere else, unless AF literally isn’t an option. All AF all the time for paid work. I don’t pay big bucks for fancy cameras with fancy AF systems to fuck around with manual focus and miss a shot for a client.

As a photographer that’s “made it”, it takes a lot to get there. I’ve said it elsewhere, but it took me way longer to get from 0/year to 10k/year in photography than 10k/yr to 100k/yr. I did it on the side as a teenager until my early 20s. My first year truly full-time, I netted about $15,000. Now I make that or more in a good month (early 30s now). But it’s still feast or famine and very much subject to the whims of the universe. I need to stay on top of my personal finances to not get cocky. I can make 1k one month and 20k the next. It’s not a steady paycheck, and just because you’re working hard, it doesn’t always mean you’re actually making money (things don’t pan out like you hope, clients get shitty about paying on time, you can end up spending $10k to make $5k while still doing 10k of work, etc.). You can mitigate against that in a lot of ways, but it’s still always there at the core.

I “made it” in a very specific low competition (if you’re good) niche. It’s about a billion times harder in a saturated niche like weddings, fashion, nature, landscape, etc. That shit’s cutthroat. I’m lucky enough that I have work coming out of my ears and don’t spend a dime on marketing or promotion.

This is it. I’ve been using it for literally 15 years and have no formal or structured training, just figuring things out and looking up specifics. I’m sure I’m doing plenty of things “the wrong way” but my clients don’t care.

Seconding that. I work in a similar niche and make bank. The key is combining photography with another skill, interest, or hobby. I have nearly no substantial competition and have clients coming out of my ears with zero dollars spent on marketing and actively avoiding people.

As long as your cameras aren’t set to different time zones… ask me how I know.

But yes overall I agree. I use the hell out of Bridge.

It’s a hog but it does the job (same is true for most Adobe software).