Once Was Lost.....

Imagine my horror when not a single photo showed up when I was uploading my CF card to the laptop! And to think that the photos I took were of the birds of two of our favorite spots in Orange County - San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary and Bolsa Chica - and also those from our first day in Arizona! My mind raced to what caused such mishap. Perhaps it was when I reset the date in the camera settings. It was still in Philippine time so I changed it to U.S. Pacific Coast time. Or I might have pushed a wrong button. In a state of panic I asked for help via Facebook. Friends responded quickly. Two of them, Jun Osano and Micky Lim, even offered the codes needed to access the data using a specific software. I tried those but somehow it didn't work. Possibly it was because the software was designed for the Sandisk brand whereas my CF card's was Lexar.

Days passed and my heart still couldn't bear the fact that I might have lost my shots for good. Not that there were any photo lifers there, or that Cynthia also took pictures of practically the same birds using her own camera. Still......

I took the CF card to Samy's Camera who quoted me $35 for the recovery process. That afternoon I got a call from them saying they were not able to recover even a single shot from the card. So we went to the store and picked up my damaged CF. Since Cynthia and I are planning to go to Costa Rica in a couple of weeks, I bought a 64GB Lexar CF card which was on sale. At home when I opened the package, voila! there was a code provided should I need to recover a damaged card! After downloading the recovery software we (with my son, Kurt's, help) tried to work it out. Yes, we managed to get some raw files but they were from an earlier session and not those from the Orange County foray.

It was after our trip to Costa Rica and with a lot of time in our hands that I tried to run the software again. This time it was a complete success! What were once lost, now are found!

Here are some of those recovered shots:

American Avocet

Black-necked Stilt

Allen's Hummingbird

Savannah Sparrow

White-crowned Sparrow