In 2007, Lindsay Scallan of Newnan, Georgia took her camera — complete with underwater housing — on a trip to Hawaii. It was on that trip, during a nighttime scuba dive in Kaanapali, that Scallan lost her camera to the deep blue. Understandably, she didn’t expect she would ever see it again.
But as we’ve seen in the past, the rule is “never say never” when it comes to finding long-lost photographs. Six years later, the Canon Powershot washed up 6,200 miles away on the beaches of Taiwan where a China Airlines employee picked it up, and began searching for the owner. Read more…
Argentinian photographer Daniel Mordzinski, know for his work photographing literary giants, is accusing famous French newspaper Le Monde of trashing 27 years of his work without warning. Boxes worth of negatives and slides were allegedly thrown away when the photographer’s office at the newspaper was cleaned out without notice earlier this month. Read more…
How long can photos stay alive inside a Canon Rebel DSLR sitting at the bottom of a muddy creek? A crazy new lost-and-found story suggests that the answer is at least 3 years.
The story, first reported by John Alexander over at PostStar, is fit for a Sherlock Holmes short story.
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The subjects in portrait projects are often selected for something they all have in common. The people seen in Brooklyn-based photographer Caroll Taveras‘ project You Are Here have this in common: they were lost at the Olympics. Commissioned by Mother London, Taveras finds tourists at the Olympic games who are hopelessly lost, and then guides them to their desired destinations in exchange for a portrait.
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A photographer’s worst nightmare happened to YouTube filmmaker Casey Neistat recently. After taking a taxi after a long 18-hour work day and flight, Neistat accidentally forgot all of his luggage — and $13,238.86 worth of camera gear — in the back of a New York City taxi cab. Among the equipment lost was a Canon 5D Mark III kit ($4300), a 24-70mm lens ($1600), and about $550 worth of memory cards — equipment necessary for Neistat to make a living.
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The latest photo to go viral on the web is a photo about photos. Lost photos, that is. Earlier today a man named Roland van Gogh shared the above image on Facebook and on Reddit, stating,
My father in law found a red Nikon Coolpix camera on 2012-06-20 in the train at the station Amsterdam Amstel in the Netherlands. His photos show a trip throughout Europe from about 2012-05-07. Since 2012-06-15 he stayed in Amsterdam.
We would like to give him back the camera and the photos. Please Like, Share and spread this photo around so we can give him back his camera! Thanks!
The image quickly racked up tens of thousands of shares on Facebook (it at nearly 40,000 at the time of this post), and some progress appears to have been made: Roland reports that he has received a lead to the woman in the photo.
(via Mashable)
If you were to lose your camera today, would anyone who found it be able to get in touch with you? If not, it might be a good idea to put a couple “digital dog tags” on your camera’s memory card. First, add a photo with your contact information onto the card so that anyone looking through the photos on the camera will come across it. Next, add a series of text documents to the root directory of your memory card (the first directory that appears when you access the card on a computer). Give these files names that both attract attention and contain your contact info. Open up these text documents and add your full contact details. This way, anyone who opens up your card on a computer will (hopefully) see your info as well.
These tips are especially useful if you’re traveling with your camera, since you might not be clearing the data off your card very frequently and may have a higher chance of losing your camera.
(via Reddit)
Kurtis Hough of Portland, Oregon made this informative step-by-step video on how you can quickly lose $2,400 in just 24 seconds. It was shot using a Canon 5D Mark II.
Wildlife photographer Markus Thompson was scuba diving in Deep Bay outside Vancouver recently when he stumbled upon a rusty Canon Rebel DSLR at the bottom of the ocean floor. After taking the SD card out and cleaning it, he was surprised to discover that it still worked, especially because the photos on it revealed that the camera was dropped back in August 2010. Thompson then turned to Google+ to find the owners, writing,
Approximately 50 pictures on the card from a family vacation. If you know a fire fighter from British Columbia whose team won the Pacific Regional Firefit competition, has a lovely wife and (now) 2 year old daughter – let me know. I would love to get them their vacation photos :)
After receiving thousands of comments and shares, he received an email from a friend of the owner, making this yet another crazy example of the Internet being used to reunite lost photos with their owners! You can see more photos of the DSLR here, in case you’re wondering what a year of seawater can do to a camera.
(via Markus Thompson via The Verge)
Image credit: Photograph by Markus Thompson
A photographer was recently reunited with his lost photographs after another photographer happened to stumble upon them at a flea market. Photographer-turned-filmmaker Alexi Tan lost his entire photographic archive some time ago while shooting his first feature film in China. He had accidentally let his credit card expire, leading his New York-based storage company to auction off his archive.
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