Grace and I had headed off to Monterey and Pacific Grove for a quick couple of nights' 'vacation' last week. We'd never been and were dying to make the escape from the city. We'd only been on one short but very good jaunt up to the Redwoods since I moved here last May so this was very special. For native Puget-Sounders getting out of dodge to Nature is of paramount importance.
Of course, both of us being photographers, the opportunity for spectacular imagery to surface and be captured in an area like this part of the California coastline was an incredible draw. There are no guarantees, of course. Fog could roll in and cover so much of what there is to see (not that this would stop either of us...) but thankfully this was not the case. The forecast looked pretty good, and even partly cloudy which augments golden hours to religious experiences. Witnessing them makes life worth living, and capturing them effectively to share with others...well, yeah. We all love sharing that which we produce ourselves.
I, being a serious amateur, would be practicing like crazy given this opportunity. Practice, practice, practice. Practice conjures improvement. I have never liked 'practice makes perfect'.
When one is a practicing artist, you like to be able to mull over your work. Right? As a photographer, critique yourself...tinker with ideas in post, clean things up, crop, look for those hidden gems you didn't know you captured by accident, even embellish a few things and turn them into an extension of what your personality sees and enjoys as 'art'. Share.
That said, it amazes me that I can now go on a trip like this and not fill up a 32GB SD card, even shooting at 36.3MP (~28-56MB files, most around 40MB), shooting only a few hundred images. You get more discerning as you gain experience. One fine-tunes what they hit the shutter for. Spray-and-pray gives way to very carefully setting up a shot. You wait, you watch, you learn. Light is like a wild animal - you can change its behavior in post, but to have anything worth working with you have to capture and tame it in its natural environment and be true to its nature.
Of course, I've seen people dye their poor dogs hot pink. It may be their version of art, or some statement they are trying to make, but or some reason it doesn't resonate with me personally. Entertainment I suppose, with painful sympathy for the animal. But! Embellish as you like, I say - as long as you aren't hurting anyone or anything. Saturate away - people love color and I am certainly no different. I love my eye candy. Although...some of the portrait photography I've seen lately made my stomach turn. Disclaimer: I could say the same about a lot of my own early images...! And even to this day, but thankfully far fewer.
Given this was my first time to this area I was fit to be tied; I was moving around like crazy. There was one other serious photographer (besides Grace, off doing her own thing) set up on a rock out there one night for a great sunset...I didn't get to talk to him but it was obvious he was after one very specific 'shot', obvious he had been there many times before. I secretly wished him much success.
Wonderful area. I'd very happily start packing today to leave San Francisco for Pacific Grove. I shot several hundred images and, of course, could not wait to get home and pull them into my computer to get a good look at all that light and color on a screen bigger than my camera's little 3.2" LCD. It is something like hunting for thunder eggs and not knowing what is inside until you get them home to cut them open. The proverbial treasure hunt.
Home. Charge batteries. Slap the card into the reader, copy images. I recalled noticing that my camera had rolled over _DSC9999 while out shooting that last evening and made what turned out to be a wholly insufficient mental note that, on the SD card, it had created two folders - 100something and 101something. It has been a while since I have rolled over 9999 images, so I had been conditioned to the point of reflexively deleting the files at the root of the SD card as soon as I was done copying and backing up that card's contents. Yeah. You see where this is going.
100something had been copied over and backed up to another drive. I opened Lightroom and imported for a look. Images from all three days, but not as many as I had thought. "Damn, I shot far fewer then I thought!" Then, as I looked through them, I started noticing that the ones I was really looking for were missing. The ones from the final night with what happened to have the best sunset and the bulk of my experimenting and practice.
Then it hit me.
I had forgotten about the 101something folder completely. I had deleted everything from the SD card once I had finished the first, having jumped back to root and not giving my eyes a last chance to see that other folder. You know that feeling of getting kicked in the gut, right? Well, ok, neither do I, but I bet our imaginations aren't far off. Shit.
Not a fun feeling. I festered all that evening. Pouting, pissed at myself, crap. Finally slept on it and decided that it was still great fun and incredibly enjoyable. But I still wanted to use that time for improvement, dammit. Sigh...next time.
The next morning I was thinking about my typical modus operandi...I am, after all, a techie of twenty years. I recalled all those crazy times I had recovered other peoples' information at times like this...I had just never done it for myself. I recalled that I typically don't reformat any kind of storage device very often. Techies, sue me - we all have our opinions and I feel that reformatting too often degrades the storage surface/registers more quickly than would otherwise be expected. There was a glimmer of hope, as 'deleting' doesn't always mean 'deleting permanently' in this arena.
So off I went. I'll try to be concise as I spent over eight hours yesterday on this recovery project. Fortunately I had not shot any new images as if you 'delete' and not 'reformat' a card it only overwrites given parts of the card as it needs to, leaving behind most of the data that was there previously; it basically only wipes the file allocation information information. You can read up on FAT and other file systems as you like if you want more info but I'll try to keep this to low-tech ideas.
I searched through today's iterations of file recovery tools, tried a few from reputable sources and landed on Recuva. I could try others as I was effectively only reading from the card, not changing the information that was there. I'll leave the explanation on how to use it to its developers and others; suffice it to say it was interesting how many files were still on the card, dating back to June 2014. In the interest of experimenting I restored everything I could find. The crazy thing, and this might have been a limitation of the free version I was using, was that I could see the original _DSC0001 to _DSCXXXX files I had 'lost' but when I recovered them to disk and tried importing them Lightroom was not able to. Corrupt, missing information, I am not sure. There did exist these files named (likely from something in part of the metadata) Michael Pichahchy_###.nef files of all kinds, over a thousand of them.
I ended up restoring everything I could to a temporary folder to see what Lightroom could recognize and what it could not. I pared down the huge list of images to only those I was missing - 179 en totale. I knew I was missing quite a few!! What sucked is that they were scattered numerically all over those listed, and intermixed with files dating back about seven months. The cool thing is that all of the original information was there - all of the metadata, and seemingly no loss of image information, even to 1:1 in Lightroom. So...I could have festered over a script to rename them somehow but given how they were all over there was nothing linear I could do, so I spent the last hour of recovery working out the order based on metadata and renaming them manually. It wasn't too bad...a little penance for having made such a blunder. Ultimately a small price to pay and I was given an opportunity to brush up on some atrophying l337 g33k ski11z.
So, another happy ending. Very happy - some of these are very enjoyable and I learned a ton. And I am only getting started with this batch, too.
I can't wait to get out there again.
(Monterey 2 removed temporarily)
©2015 Michael Pichahchy
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