lostandfound

There will always be photo shoots that test your creativity, and sometimes there are campaigns that seem to just give you incredible images. Deadliest Catch is definitely a campaign that lends its hand to stunning visuals… at the cost of your comfort.

Back in 2013, five friends in Arizona decided to capture some photos and video from the edge of space by sending a GoPro up on a weather balloon. The camera made it to 98,000 feet, but the guys lost track of it after it landed out of cell phone tower range. All seemed lost, and the team spent months wondering if they'd ever find the camera.

Fast forward to a couple of months ago: the team got a phone call from a woman who found a strange box with their names on it. In it was the camera and all of the original images.

Anne-Marie Valentine was on a camping trip at Folsom Lake in California last month when she spotted what appeared to be a dead seagull at the bottom of the dry lake bed. When she got closer, she realized that it was a camera drone that someone had crashed into the lake before the drought had sucked away water. What's more, footage in the video camera was still intact, and it showed the drone's unfortunate final flight.

The photos on the memory card in a DSLR can survive more than what you might think. This past weekend, a man named David McFadyen was exploring Laguna Lake in San Luis Obispo, California, when he found a Canon Rebel T1i DSLR camera on the dry lake bed.

It turns out the camera had been lost two years ago, and the photographs inside managed to survive all that time at the bottom of a lake.

If your camera lets you automatically add copyright EXIF metadata to every photo you take, you should do it: it could help you recover your gear if it ever gets stolen. That's exactly what happened to photographer Jon Grundy: after losing $15,000 in gear, Grundy was able to identify the thief and recover his stolen equipment after seeing his name in the copyright info of online photos.

A former Ryanair flight attendant has pleaded guilty to stealing items that passengers left behind on airplanes. He was busted after a man accidentally left his DSLR behind and then later found the same camera for sale on eBay.

Underwater photographer John Ng was diving off the coast of the Maldives last month when he noticed something stuck among the rocks and coral reef at the bottom of the ocean. After a recovery and investigation, it turned out to be an underwater camera that had been lost last year -- a camera that was still perfectly functional.

GoPros exist to take quite a beating... they are action cams after all. However, as much as GoPro might put its products through the wringer to test them and ensure they’re up for anything, it’s unlikely they expect one to survive what the one in the above video did.

The functioning camera managed to survive in a riverbed for 17 months! And not only did it survive, the footage of the camera’s final moments was still safe and sound on the memory card inside.

Photographer John Oliver of Film Foto Forever didn't know his grandfather-in-law, Jackson McIntosh Holliday, was a photographer until it was too late. Jack passed away on October 11th, 2013, and it was only recently, when John's wife and her family were sorting through her grandfather's things, that they found an old Leica IIIC in amazing condition and 20k plus slides of his work.

Last week, we and many others ran the story of a rather astounding collection of photographs that were supposedly discovered in a foxhole where the infamous Battle of the Bulge took place.

Allegedly found by U.S. Navy Captain Mark Anderson and accompanying historian Jean Muller, the story goes that the duo found then scanned the images in an old camera, presenting them to the world seventy years after they were captured and left behind by a soldier who had been KIA. But that, it seems, is not the truth.

Update: Turns out this story was a hoax. Head on over to our update and apology to catch up on the latest.

The Battle of the Bulge is known as one of the most deadly and influential battles of WWII. Taking place over the course of five weeks, this surprise attack by the Germans caught allied forces off-guard, causing massive casualties, especially among U.S. Troops.

Among the 89,000 casualties was a soldier named Louis J. Archambeau, a Chicago native who left behind an interesting surprise in a foxhole he had been taking refuge in during the cold weather and rough artillery fire.

While taking her usual walk along the water on Cardiff State Beach, California resident Marian Rogers came across a waterproof camera, still intact, and whose memory card still held the images of what appears to be newlyweds. A camera she is trying her best to reunite with its former owners.

This week, 24 incredible, powerful, haunting photographs will be going up on the auction block at Bonhams in New York. These are photographs that are newly-discovered, and many of them have never been seen before as they were taken with a faulty camera and never made it in front of the public eye.

They are photographs of Nagasaki, Japan, taken by celebrated Japanese military photographer Yosuke Yamahata the day after an atomic bomb was dropped on it and Hiroshima.

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 have a feeling this is something every photographer does or has done at some point in their life. Walking through a flea market or thrift shop, they look around and see an older camera. Not one they have any interest in purchasing, but one they do have interest in. Why? For what could be inside. They are in the search of film... film that isn’t theirs. They hope to find photographs from a time long gone and possibly forgotten.

I’ve done it myself and I’d put good money down that many of you have as well. Usually the cameras come up empty, and even if they don’t, oftentimes the photographs themselves are nothing special. But every so often someone hits the jackpot, and that was the case recently with Matt Ames.

If you thought Photoshop 1.0 was primitive, take a look at the video above. What you’re watching is a short section of film shot at the Amiga launch conference that took place in 1985.

Specifically, you're watching world-renown artist Andy Warhol using his first ever computer to digitally edit a photograph of Debbie Harry by “painting” over it using the Amiga’s graphic program.

Update on 12/16/21: This video has been removed by its creator.

Note to any camera thief who attempts to get rid of the camera at a pawn shop: it might be beneficial to at least know how to turn the thing on. Not only that, but when questioned about where you “found” the camera and when asked to file a missing item report, don’t run off -- I’ve heard it doesn’t help with the whole suspicion factor.

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.