Trail Running in Winter, Colorado
Digital photography is a world of convenience. No film to buy, process and take up space in your freezer, no need to shoot “in-camera dupes” every time you think you have a keeper, no worrying about clients losing your valuable slides. If nothing else, think of the all square footage you save by not having to store boxes or file cabinets full of slide pages. Less than one square foot of hard drive space can easily store a hundred thousand images.
That said, when something goes wrong with digital photography, it tends to really go wrong. Usually, these problems involve some kind of data loss. As many photographers have learned, a corrupt memory card or a crashed hard drive will easily ruin your day. Believe me.
The first time this happened to me, I had just finished shooting a great trail running session. Some unusually cold spring weather combined with fog created some amazing rhyme ice effects in all the trees and bushes, making for great images, at least I thought so when I previewed the shots in my camera.
However, when I got home and tried to load the images onto my computer, I was hit with error messages saying that the card was unreadable. That’s when I swore. In fact, I swore quite a few times, before calming down and calling Nikon tech support. They were incredibly helpful, but unfortunately, nothing they advised me to do worked.
Eventually, I got on the web and found RescuePro, a data recovery software made by LC Technology. 40 bucks and a few minutes later, I was back on track editing all the images that RescuePro recovered.
There are quite a few recovery programs out there, but this one is endorsed by Sandisk, which is the brand of cards that I use. In fact, some of Sandisk’s Extreme cards include a coupon for a free download of RescuePro.
Memory cards and some hard drives are usually pretty durable. I know people who have sent cards through the washer and drier, and I’ve even heard of cards being run over by cars, and one that ended up hundreds of feet below the ocean in a plane wreck. In any of these cases, there were no lost images.
Occasionally they do fail, though. Actually, it’s rarely the card itself that fails, it’s usually an error in the pathway that the data takes from the card or drive to the computer. It’s as if the bridge between the two devices has been damaged. The images are still there, they just can’t be brought across. Recovery software acts like a rescue chopper that flies over the damaged bridge and brings back your stranded images.
There are a couple of things you can do to help prevent memory card failure. Make sure you turn the camera off before you remove the card, and wait until the write process is done before you remove it. Sometimes, it takes awhile for the camera to write to the card, especially after a long burst of continuous shooting. Also, whenever you remove the card, always transfer the images to your computer and then reformat the card as soon as you put it back in the camera. Shooting multiple sessions on one card can increase your chance of failure. Also, don’t use batteries to complete exhaustion; having batteries die while the camera is writing image data is an easy way to lose images.
In some cases, recovery software isn’t able to recover the information, and the only option is to send the card in to a company that specializes in data recovery. The cost is usually higher than the software, but how much are your lost images worth?
———-
Dan Bailey is a professional adventure, outdoor and travel photographer based in Anchorage, Alaska. You can follow his own blog at danbaileyphoto.com/blog and see his daily Facebook updates at facebook.com/danbaileyphoto
Share on Digg
Share on StumbleUpon
Bookmark on del.icio.us
