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| Recently deforested area of Mount Moriah Cemetery, Philadelphia |
Anyway, as we were walking, I was taking photos with my Olympus Pen E-P1 digital camera. After turning it on and off a few times over the course of a half hour, I was greeted with the image you see in the display below. The message “! Card Error” can strike fear into the heart of the staunchest photographer. It of course implies a problem with the replaceable memory card. There is no card access, either to create and store a new image nor to view any old ones.
What was on the card? Well, about fifty images from the Procession
of Saints and a few dozen other things, nothing of great importance. Would they
be lost? Possibly. Was I extremely upset? Not so much. After having experienced
loss of cameras, images, and memory cards over the past dozen digital years,
I’ve learned to be rather paranoid about such things, and therefore, somewhat prepared. If it happens to you,
accept the possibility that some of your work may just disappear into the ether.
However, all may not be lost.
Don’t believe everything you think!
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| April 2015 issue of Rangefinder |
1. While services exist that can attempt to
retrieve your data for you (e.g. “DriveSavers” at www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com),
this can be very expensive ($500-- $1,000 depending on the number of images
recovered).
2.
Most downloadable data recovery programs have a
free trial scan, at which point you pay for the software if the scan determines
that the data can be retrieved.
3.
Below is a list of software you can use to help
retrieve your lost images:
“Picture Rescue 2” available for $20 from www.prosofteng.com
“Sandisk Rescuepro” available for $39.99 at
“Photorecovery” available for $40 at http://www.lc-tech.com
“Lexar Image Rescue 5” available for $34 at www.lexar.com/imagerescue
Will you ever need a data retrieval software program?
Perhaps not. Maybe you’ll just accidentally drop your memory
card in the weeds and it will be gone forever. But I would suggest that you do
make some attempt to reduce your potential risk of data loss.
How can you minimize your risk?
After all, putting all your hopes in a software program to
retrieve your images may not be the wisest thing to do. I routinely use a few
backup methods, simply because I am paranoid about loss. And that
is because I have lost images to corrupt memory cards, damaged memory cards,
and lost memory cards! As Charles Manson once said,
“Total paranoia is total awareness.”
The 5 Stages of Loss and Grief
Did I lose a lot of precious images on that 4 Gig card?
Probably. I tried not to think about the spilled milk. In an unprecedented
short period of about two hours, I went through the five steps of grieving and loss (identified by
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book “On Death and Dying”). I experienced
denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. As a result, I
have since made a habit of doing the following:
1. Shoot with two cameras. I did this at the
Procession of Saints, so if the card giving me the “Card Error” was
kaput, I had some backup images on another camera.
2. Don’t use a large capacity memory card. The more
space you have, the more tempting it is to just use it until it fills up. If
something happens to a full 16 Gig card, you’ve lost way more data than if you
had lost a full 4 Gig card.
3. As soon as you do a shoot, download or copy your
primo images onto a hard drive or laptop. I do this with all the images I make
of my children and my cemetery work.
So what happened in my recent “Card Error” situation?
I
popped the SD card
out of my Olympus Pen E-P1(a micro four-thirds format camera) and into my Canon G11 DPS
camera to see if the Canon could read the card (I call digital point-and-shoots
“DPS” cameras in my book, Digital Photography for the Impatient). Lo and
behold, the Canon read the card! Saints preserve us! Next step was to connect the
card to my laptop via a card reader and upload the images to my hard drive.
After doing so, I reformatted the Kodak 4 Gig SD card and reused it in the
Olympus. I have had no problem with it since.The Resurrection
So my memory card was granted a new lease on life, much like how (the formerly abandoned) Mount Moriah Cemetery in Philadelphia has these days. Here is a photo (below) retrieved from my funky memory card - it shows the trees that had been cut from around a crypt which was being crowded out by the invasive species. In fact, all the images of the saints and the cemetery you see in this article are from that naughty SD card. (By the way, you can check the progress of restoration efforts here on the Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery, Inc. Facebook Group Page.)
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| Mount Moriah Cemetery, Philadelphia |
Lessons learned?
My paranoid, risk-averse tendencies regarding the safeguarding of my images will likely continue. Also, since this is the only “Card Error” I have ever experienced
and this happened to me on the only Kodak brand memory card I have ever used, I
won’t buy Kodak memory cards anymore.
References and Further Reading:
References and Further Reading:
Rangefinder magazine website
Download the April 2015 issue of Rangefinder magazine on either of these site:
