Month: May 2009

I saved the lost photos!  Actually I didn’t but a nice piece of free software did.

After the last post I remembered a program that I’d used to help a friend salvage some lost photos on a memory card back last fall.  I had done a great job and still had it installed on my laptop so I decided to give it a chance.  It managed to recover all of the photos except for two and it got both of the photos I really wanted to save.  All the lessons in the last post still apply, but along with that here are two free programs to help you out in case you forget like I did:

Smart Recovery – This is the program that saved my photos.  It’s freeware and written specifically to recover photo and video files from media.  The biggest feature is that is supports the camera raw formats for Nikon and Canon among others.

TestDisk/PhotoRec – Another nice pair of freeware recovery programs.  TestDisk is for more meant for you computer hard drive and big problems like crashes drives.  PhotoRec is like Smart Recovery a file recovery tool, but it’s a little more general purpose than Smart Recovery and can recovery Office files and Adobe files along with some less common formats.  In this case it couldn’t get the missing photo files back, but I’ve had success with it in the past and would use it for non photo/video files.

Here are two samples (unprocessed) of what all the work was about:

Updated – I tried another program that I was able to salvage the photos with.  See the next post for details.

Nothing sucks the fun out of a shoot like finding out you lost some great shots because a memory card bombed out.  Short version.  At the end of a recent shoot I agreed to shoot a short set up swimsuit photos for the model.  She had a bright pink bikini against a bright green background that I have that looked great.  It was a perfect combination of model, outfit, and lighting.  I saw at least two awesome shots in the quick set that would be posted here if I had them.  So I get back to my computer and attempt to pull the photos into Lightroom so the model can see them before she leaves.  It finds nothing on the card.  I realize that the card was an old one that actually used to be in a PDA that I stopped using about two years ago and I’d not formatted it before starting the shoot.  It worked fine when I shot with it, but now I can’t find the photos.  I put the card back into the camera and it now tells me the card isn’t formatted.  Where was that message before?  I’ve run it through a couple of recovery programs and neither found any of the files.  This is the first time that I’ve completely lost photos and I’m ticked off right now.

Lessons learned:

1. No matter how big of a hurry you are in, always format a card in the camera if you’ve not used it in the same camera recently.  Actually I think that I’ll start doing it no matter what.
2. When you are hurrying is always when you make mistakes so slow down.

The good news is that the other photos from the shoot are all fine, just that last set are lost.

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while.  It’s been a couple of crazy weeks with barely time to do anything including photography.  Finally I get to get back to some good work and I have a couple of shoots over the weekend and I’m looking forward to getting back behind the camera.  Still working on the gallery which I hope to have up early next week along with some new photos from the coming shoots.

I’ve changed to a more generic theme for the moment as I work out some problems with my custom theme.

Also taken down the gallery to rework it.  For now please view my work on either ModelMayhem or OneModelPlace.