Fun with Underoath Part 2

I shot Underoath at Warped 2009, the Hartford date. They were the last band I shot on that particular day. Good thing too, as it was getting dark.

I was shooting three Warped days in one week, Hartford, Scranton, and Camden. I have six 16gb memory cards for my two cameras. If that sounds like a lot, it isn't. I'm shooting raw files which are huge and the 3 cards per camera are just enough to get by.

My plan was download and back everything up on the days between shows. I shot Hartford on Sunday, but had to work Monday and Tuesday before the Scranton day on Wednesday. Due to limited time, I rushed through the download and back-up as fast as possible so I could reformat the cards for use in Scranton.

Same drill between Scranton and Camden.

When the dust settled, I finally had a chance to go through everything. I was making selects of the Underoath gallery when I noticed there didn't seem to be enough pictures. I noticed right away that I didn't have any shots of Chris Dudley, the synth player and I was positive I'd shot him.

My stomach got cold and tingly. High capacity memory cards separate images into different folders. Was it possible I didn't download one of the folders and had lost the pictures?

I checked into it. The last picture taken by my "B" camera at Hartford was #3221 (the camera assigns each picture a unique number in ascending order) and the first picture shot on that camera at Scranton was #3386. Numbers 3222 thru 3385 were missing. 165 pictures. Ouch.

I scoured my two back up hard drives, but found nothing. The pictures were gone. The chill in my stomach turned to a writhing nausea. For a photographer, there's nothing worse than losing pictures. And it had to be Underoath, one of the bands I was most excited about.

Then I remembered a program called Rescue Pro that had come with my San Disk memory cards. I'd never messed with it because I'd never needed it. I rooted through my drawers until i found the disk, installed the program, and ran it on the card where the Underoath pictures would have been. Remember, the card had been re-formatted, but I knew that formatting doesn't erase data. Data is only erased if you write new data over it. So was there a chance the card still had some missing Underoath pictures on it?

The answer was yes. Not only did the card still have some Underoath pictures on it, it had all 165 of the missing shots. By some fluke, I hadn't shot enough at Scranton or Camden on that particular card to write over them.

An unusual outcome, but a welcome one. Half the shots in the final gallery were recovered and otherwise would have been lost to the mists of time.

Thanks, San Disk. I promise to be more careful next time.