Merry Christmas: I Am a Giant Freaking Moron
December 23rd, 2007 by jeff
Today, Katya and I decided to try and get ourselves into the holiday spirit by going out and taking a boatload of photos in various spots around Houston. It was a beautiful day with incredible weather. Despite a minor overeating issue I had in the late afternoon, we had a really great time and I got some amazing photos.
We got photos of Santa in front of a pawn shop, shots at the zoo that were amazing, shots of lights on Post Oak, long exposures of cars hurling down Memorial and maybe a few of the best images I’ve ever taken downtown. One photo in particular was probably the best night photo I’ve ever taken - a shot of the full moon in between two buildings downtown shot from the reflecting pool in front of City Hall complete with slick water, beautiful Christmas lights, a lone guy sitting on a bench and streaking clouds across the night sky thanks to a wonderful long exposure.
When we finished, we went to Starbucks to get something warm to drink and I was going to head home to revel in my images. I was FINALLY in the Christmas spirit.
Then, all hell broke loose.
Earlier, my battery power ran out and my first card filled up. When I got back to the truck, I swapped out my battery and checked to make sure it worked. When I did, I noticed the card said FULL. At that moment, for some bizarre reason, I thought I had already replaced the flash card. Yeah, I know.
A few seconds later, I had a re-formatted card and I was ready to go. We took a few more photos and I didn’t think twice about it.
When we got to Starbucks, I reached into my pocket and found my 4GB card. That was the card that was SUPPOSED to be in my camera. Why is it sitting in my hand I thought? Then I realized…OH SHIT! I just wiped out every photo I took today. Every freaking image. EVERYTHING.
Needless to say, I was broken hearted. It has been that way for pretty much the entire holiday for me. If it hasn’t been one thing, it’s been another. Here I was, shooting pictures with my friend, singing Christmas songs spun by Casey Kasem on his holiday top 60 and loving the beautiful weather. It was a fantastic time marred by one incredibly stupid mistake.
Merry freaking Christmas.
UPDATE: I’m still a moron, but thankfully, there are people like Greg in the world, who took time on his Christmas Eve (he’s in Australia) to help me out. I managed to recover all of the images save one. Interestingly, they all saved as JPG’s even though I store everything as RAW files. Whatever, they are big, beautiful jpg images and I’m just thrilled to have them back.
Woo hoo!!!
That *really* sucks.
All is not lost though — there are utilities that can recover from these sorts of mistakes. As long as you didn’t use it much after the reformat, you should be able to recover most of the images.
Ping me if you want some more info or help.
Oh man! That is just awful! My heart dropped reading that. I hope Greg can help you recover the images.
Oh my goodness, Greg, if you could help Jeff save this card, I’d be crying with happiness. It was such a great day, and the photos Jeff took were truly amazing — magical really.
Memory card or no memory card…thank you for helping me find Christmas, Jeff. It meant the world to me.
I’ve done that once, and the utilities saved me, but it is truly the worst feeling in the world.
I realized something though - because it was a GREAT day just like yours when it happened. And I thought afterwards that maybe, just maybe, the universe was trying to tell me to sloooooooow down, and enjoy the moment, and just relax. To live in the moment and stop thinking so much about the future.
Some things do happen for a reason.
I’m glad you guys found Christmas today. I might need to follow your lead - it is a great idea!
Greg is a hero.
I am so glad you were able to retrieve your images! Thanks Greg!!
Can you divulge the utilities that were used to recover them or is it all NSA, FBI, CIA secret gubment stuff?
So glad you got them back!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It feels AWFUL when that stuff happens.
@groovehouse: Greg ran me through some backup of the card in Unix (Terminal) and then we used a software from ScanDisk - RecoverPro - to get the photos back off the card.
@groovehouse There’s nothing particularly secret about this stuff (although, I’m sure the gub’ment editions of this software would involve a quirky scientist and many more special effects and than ours did
)
Computer forensic kits are freely available on the ‘net and there are plenty of purpose built tools, such as Sandisk’s RecoverPro, that hunt for one specific type of file, all with varying degrees of success, ease of use and colourful language required to make it work.
I’m going to run a few different tools over the backup image we made to see if I can improve the results. I’ll report back with some names if I find any that work better.
@katya Appreciate the thought, but Superman-style capes don’t really suit me
I’m just tryin’ to make someone else’s Christmas a little better than it otherwise would have been.
I’m so glad Greg was able to help you. I did the same, exact thing and I cursed myself upside down and sideways for deleting the images. A fellow photoblogger had a free utility program and had to walk me through it using my work PC, but I got most of them back. I know this is a terrible thing to have happen, but I feel better after reading that all these people I admire have done the same thing. I don’t feel *quite* so stupid. Maybe it is one of those rites of passage that people have to go through.