It's tempting: buying a 8GB memory card with your digital camera so you can hold 2,500 pictures and never have to worry about switching cards. You can go days, even months without connecting your camera to the computer and show pictures of Christmas parties at Halloween balls. That is, until something goes wrong with your memory card and you lose everything on it. The ability to store 2,500 pictures means you can also lose 2,500 pictures, at once.

That's what happened to me the other day when I was shooting my cousin's wedding (don't these things happen at the worst possible timing?). Two thirds through the reception, my camera gives me a "Card not formatted" error. This was a split second after I took my 250th (roughly) picture of the day. I panicked; here was someone's once in a lifetime (hopefully) event, and I just lost 250 pictures portraying it (for those that don't know me, I used to shoot for a newspaper in college, and still shoot as a hobby). Luckily, besides the 1GB card that died, I also had an old 256MB card which allowed me to keep shooting, albeit conservatively (I once shot 360 pictures in a 2 hour span, and that was on film).

Fortunately, this story has a happy ending. After trying the 1GB card on numerous card readers, I took it to a professional data recovery service, and they were able to salvage all the pictures except eight. They charged by the MegaByte, so recovering a 1GB card cost me about $70, the cost of many GigaBytes of CF cards, but it was worth every penny (or in this case, yen).

Having learned my lesson, I will now go purchase two or three 512MB cards (or 1GB, if the price is no different) and be adamant about changing cards during a shoot. I carry my camera in a camera bag so holding several extra cards is no problem. As for the criminal 1GB card, I will ceremoniously destroy it by driving nails through it. Actually, I'll label it as risky and only use it if all my other cards spontaneously combust and I'm hundred miles from the nearest electronics store.

As for the images above and below, the data recovery service had an interesting side effect of recovering pictures I deleted long time ago. Many of these reappeared, and some of the images were garbled together. None of these pictures are edited in Photoshop. I'm simply uploading them as I found them on the recovery CD. The one on the top is actually a mix of two weddings, one of my college roommate back in December in Kansas City, and my cousin's in Japan two weeks ago. Call it accidental art.

Labels: accident, advice, art, digital, photography

Are our kids at risk of not knowing their youth?

It used to be that when you took a picture, it burned an image onto a film negative that was printed onto photo paper, which then you took home to enjoy with your family and friends before storing it in a photo album or shoe box. Now you take a picture with your digital camera, which then stores the image in a series of 1s and 0s that you can enjoy on your computer and share to the world. While going digital has much more benefits than film (especially cost-per-picture), it has one big drawback: it’s fragile.

Anyone who’s experienced a catastrophic hard disk failure knows that when digital media fails, it’s total. Some times, you might be able to save fragments of the data by taking it to an expensive data recovery service, but that depends on your luck. How often does this happen? Often enough that no hard disk company is willing to warranty their products for more than five years (and normally two). Sure you can protect yourself by setting up a RAID, but how many people know how to do that? (or even know what RAID is)

The other common option is to back up the data on CDs or DVDs, but most home-burnt media has a rated life span of three years. Further more, like any media, there is a chance that they become obsolete and players/readers extremely hard to find.

Photo prints, on the other hand, don’t require any extra equipment to enjoy, and while they slowly degrade over time, they never suddenly vanish (negatives are even more permanent). Also because of their nostalgic value, they’re really hard to dispose of, making sure that your child hood pictures are kept somewhere in a dark closet/attic. The first children of the digital age, on the other hand, may not know what they looked like as a child, because their parents ended up losing the bytes long time ago.

Sooner or later though, after enough of the world has suffered through priceless data losses, people will realize that there is a need for reliable long-term digital data storage. Online data storage has been around for a while, but I think it will catch on with the next jump in internet technology so that people can upload and download gigabytes of photos in minutes, not hours. In fact, I think online storage is the future of data storage, but that’s for another time.

Labels: digital, photography