Alright, I may have tricked you with the title. We didn’t actually lose any pictures, but today for 6 hours I thought we had. Here’s the story (or in my case: my worst nightmare)…
Last night, after shooting a wedding we went through the normal routine of backing up our pictures and then backing them up again. Once to the mini hard drive; once to the lap top. We packed our bags and went to bed. It was going to be an early morning catching a flight back to Wenatchee from Anchorage. For the 3 hour plane ride from Anchorage to Seattle I started culling images from the wedding. I was actually being productive on a flight and was feeling pretty awesome! Until… dun dun dun…”Wait.Ben. where.are.my. photos.from.the.ceremony?!” All of the images where there except from the moment the ceremony started until they walked back up the isle. We carried our gear onto the plane so they were readily available for a full-on body search TSA style. The kicker to this moment is a groomsman and his family from the wedding had caught the same flight and just happened to be sitting one row up from us. Still no memory card. I had to freak out silently. Determined that it must have gotten left in my lens belt, which was checked, we had to wait until we got off our second flight and the 1 hour drive home to tear apart our luggage bag. Now mind you, we had Ben’s photos but he takes all the close up candids. We were thankful to have those but we had no shots of the entire scene, details, or anything pretty much other than close shots of just the bride and groom. Once home and all contents of bags on the floor: no memory card. I now had to call the resort to tell them the photographer had lost photos. Perfect. Hoping it was left in our room I let go of my pride and call to ask them to check the room and they said they would call back to let us know. Like any frantic person does, my next course of action was to call my mom. While on the phone with my mom I get a text from Ben who has since gown downstairs to load our pictures onto it’s final resting place of my desktop. He had found the missing memory card (we knew which one was missing because we number them). Confused at this point Ben goes back to the laptop and low and behold all of my pictures from the ceremony are right there where they should be! For no explainable reason whatsoever I had sorted the pictures in a way that I had unchecked all of my ceremony photos for viewing. Or something like that. Cause to say they were there all along and I just didn’t see them sounds pretty lame. And this is one more reason why I am thankful I married Ben. He pays attention to the details that I miss daily. Of course I now had to call the resort again.
I am very thankful that this happened. It let me realize a couple different things. First: a numbering system doesn’t work if you don’t have all the numbers with you. Second: when something breaks and its on a computer it must be user error and I need to hand the computer over to Ben immediately. Like I didn’t know that last one already, but a great reminder. This little slip up will be keeping me on my toes for a long while!
Here’s a photo from the “missing” memory card. It’s the end of the ceremony and we are just minutes away from a downpour!
