This week I stupidly broke one of my rules about digital images.
I’d been out on Monday on a family walk, had a very nice pub lunch and a couple of pints, and when I got home there just didn’t seem to be any urgency about transferring the pictures I’d taken from the card in my camera to the computer. There wasn’t any sort of deadline, and although I wanted the pictures – and there were a few that I thought might possible sell as stock, and I went to bed leaving the card still in the camera.
The next day I remembered I needed to transfer the files, but then I became absorbed in doing other things, and it didn’t get done.
Rather unusually, I didn’t need the camera with the card in until Thursday, having decided on a bit of a rest as I felt a little below par and there was nothing vital for me to cover. On the bus to where I was working I went through my normal camera check, setting the ISO to a sensible value for the conditions, making sure I was still on RAW and auto white balance, and making sensible settings for A, S and M modes. And as usual I pressed the play button to see if I had remembered to clear the card.
What I saw was the first frame on the card, and it was a picture from the event I covered on Sunday, and I thought I had forgotten to format the card. But stupidly I also forgot I had taken some pictures on Monday, and equally stupidly forgot to check the last frame on the card, and just formatted it.
I got home late, having gone on from taking photographs to an exhibition opening, and after falling asleep when I sat down in an armchair to have a cold drink, decided it was too late to bother with dealing with the pictures I’d taken and collapsed into bed. I didn’t fall asleep again straight away, and suddenly realised that those pictures from Monday had been on the card in the camera.
I leapt out of bed and checked the camera. Had I really formatted the card or was I just dreaming. I found I had. Just to make sure I didn’t do anything else stupid, I took both the cards I had used that day from the two cameras and left them next to the computer. No chance then that I could pick up a camera in a rush and manage to format my work again!
As I wrote the above, I was waiting fingers crossed (not the most suitable position for typing) while I hoped SanDisk RescuePRO* might come to my aid.
Unfortunately there was no happy ending. Although it found and recovered 648 files from the card, only two of them were from the Monday – and needless to say they were not the pictures I really wanted. The other 646 were those I’d taken on Thursday or from earlier occasions.
What I’d actually done on Monday I now remember was to take those two now recovered pictures, then realise that the card still had a couple of hundred pictures from Sunday on it. I’d protected the two new frames and then done a ‘delete all’ rather than a format, which had resulted in a card with a half a dozen protected frames from Sunday as well as these two new pictures. It had been those protected frames I had seen when I’d looked at the card and jumped to the conclusion it was full of work from Sunday.
I’d taken perhaps 200 pictures on Sunday, so those first two frames had space for around that number before them on the card. After the deletion it would start filling from the beginning again. The rest of my Monday files were thus at the start of the card and had all been overwritten after I formatted the card on Thursday and began taking pictures again.
The golden rule just has to be:
ALWAYS to take out the cards from your cameras when you get back from taking pictures
However tired you are.
And don’t put them back in camera until you have transferred (and backed up) the files.
*SanDisk RescuePRO came free with several of my SanDisk cards – according to SanDisk it comes with Extreme III, Extreme IV and Extreme Ducati Edition cards – but is otherwise a little expensive to buy. Most of the free programs I’ve tried either don’t seem to work at all, or find things and then tell you that you need to buy the software to actually recover them. One program I have found that does work is ZAR, which says helpfully and accurately: “You do not need a paid version of ZAR to do image recovery. This set of functions is provided free of charge.” ZAR has the advantage of recovering the file names, although slightly annoyingly it recovers .NEF files with the file type.tif and you need to rename them.
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