Update on 12/16/21: This video has been removed by its creator.
Maybe we don't give memory cards enough credit, because for all of the stories of corrupt files and irretrievable photographs, we have some astounding stories of memory cards performing above and beyond what anybody thinks they could possibly do.
I don’t know about you, but I cringe when I lose a lens cap. So I can't imagine how Christ Newman of CineChopper felt when he lost, not a measly lens cap or even a lens, but a $15,000 quadcopter.
If there's one thing I lose more than anything else while shooting, it's lens caps. I've never permanently lost one (knock on wood), but I've certainly misplaced them for days at a time. And I have a feeling I'm not the only one who's guilty of this.
Here to help us through our absentmindedness is a new Kickstarter for a product called HACKxTACK.
It’s probably every photographer’s worst nightmare. You’ve shot gigabytes worth of images, ready to be imported for post-processing, when suddenly: card is unreadable. Your captures are all gone. All that time and effort lost to a corrupted card. It happened to me, and this is how I got them back.
Stolen gear registration and recovery service Lenstag reached a major milestone last week when they successfully recovered and returned a stolen lens to its rightful owner!
News in the photo world isn't always uplifting -- what with all the layoffs and copyright scandals -- but once in a while you stumble onto one of those 'renew your faith in humanity' stories that just make you smile.
That's the uplifting story told by Imaging Resource Editor-in-Chief Dave Etchells, who recently lost $7,000 on a bullet train in Japan, only to have it found and returned to him with nary a piece missing.
We have a category called "Finds" here at PetaPixel, and never does it apply more literally than when we chance upon one of those long-lost-camera-shows-up-x-years-later-with-photos-still-intact stories. Today we have one of those astounding stories for you, featuring a camera lost three years ago that was fished out of Lake Tahoe just last week.
In the Spring of 1980, just a few weeks before the infamous Mount St. Helens eruption that would take his life along with 56 others, photojournalist Reid Blackburn captured the volcano as it looked before it exploded.
Those with delicate constitutions where the destruction of photography gear is concerned should look away or skip over this one. Whatever you do, don't press play on the video above... or if you do press play, don't watch past about the 3:50 mark, because that's when things get ugly.
If you've gone to see the blockbuster hit Gravity in theaters, you'll recall several moments when Sandra Bullock's character nearly lost something into the abyss of space -- be it a drill or a screw, everything needs to be strapped down because the slightest movement will send it careening into the unknown.
Well, that was Hollywood, but the real deal did actually happened to astronaut Sunita Williams back in 2006 when her camera just up and floated away from her during a 7-hour space walk.
"Impossible" stories don't seem to be all that impossible where cameras are concerned. For example, you might remember the Canon compact that found its way back to its owner after drifting 6,200 miles across the ocean to Taiwan.
Today's impossible story isn't quite so international, but no less amazing. After losing $1,300 worth of camera equipment to an alligator at the Everglades Alligator Farm eight months ago, another alligator was kind enough to return amateur wildlife photographer Mario Aldecoa's gear to him last week.
Yep, it happened. It really did...
I just recently finished a whirlwind Euro-trip traveling with my sisters. The itinerary was Germany (where I am currently living as a soldier with the incredible fortune to be stationed there) to London to Dublin to Paris to Barcelona and back to Germany.
Sad news from the Whistler ski resort in Canada, where a weekend search for a missing GoPro camera with priceless images for a newly widowed skier turned up nothing.
Australian couple Matt Lorraway and Rebecca Ware had a great vacation at Whistler last February, with Ware trying out skiing, snowboarding, snowmobiling and ziplining, all captured on Lorraway's helmet-mounted GoPro. Sadly, the camera fell off and got lost in the snow on one of their last ski runs.
Harry and Edna Grossmann's stories ended in 1986 and 1983, respectively. A long-time married couple, they never had kids, and instead chose a life of travel and photography. But none of this was known to most of the world until 30 old boxes containing 1,100 slides of their travels made their way into Chicago-based photographer Jeff Phillips' hands.
We won't deny it: we love a good lost and found story. When a camera goes drifting out to sea or is lost in an earthquake, only to turn up months or even years later with the photos still intact, we can't help but smile and share the story.
In this case, kitesurfer Jens Knof lost his friend's brand new GoPro Hero in February of 2011. When a spearfisherman found it two and a half months later just hanging out at the bottom of the reef, Knof was both relieved and amazed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The latest photo to go viral on the web is a photo about photos. Lost photos, that is. Earlier …
If you were to lose your camera today, would anyone who found it be able to get in touch …
Kurtis Hough of Portland, Oregon made this informative step-by-step video on how you …
Wildlife photographer Markus Thompson was scuba diving in Deep Bay outside Vancouver recently …
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.
The power of the Internet is amazing. Just yesterday we reported on how a man found a battered memory card that apparently spent four years in the ocean and recovered 104 photos from it. After the story went viral and was widely reported, the owner of the camera has now been found. The girl nearest the camera in the photo above was visiting relatives four years ago when she accidentally dropped the camera into the Pacific Ocean from a wharf Santa Cruz.
We've heard of digital photos being recovered after lost cameras drift for 1,000 miles (in underwater casing) or spend a year at the bottom of the ocean floor, but is there any hope for a camera that experiences four years of abuse at sea? Turns out there is. A man named Peter Govaars was walking along a beach in California when he stumbled upon a battered camera "skeleton" with a memory card still attached. He took the SD card home, took it apart, spent 30 minutes cleaning it, and was surprised to discover 104 photographs taken within a 2 week period in June 2007.
The Stolen Camera Finder is a new search engine developed over the past …
On June 6, 1944 — also known as D-Day — war photographer Robert …
February seems to be the month when lost photographers’ lives are saved thanks to their camera flashes. Last year …
Todd Bieber was skiing in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park after the recent blizzards when …
On May 16, Coast Guard investigator Paul Shultz was walking along a Key West, Florida marina when he came across a red Nikon L18. Although the underwater housing surrounding the camera was battered from what appeared to be a long period at sea, the camera was in tip top shape.
Recovering your camera after losing it is one of those things that most …