Teasers

The beginning of this week tried it's hardest to sour my spirit but amazingly enough I managed to remain calm and optimistic.  See our wedding photographer/friend had a huge mishap on Sunday.  As she was editing photos in lightroom, the program crashed and all the photos in it were deleted.  Because lightroom doesn't create copies of the originals, it deleted the originals she was working on when it crashed... aka all of our wedding photos.  And it didn't send them to the trash bin where they could easily be recovered.  It bypassed the bin all together and sent them to the void.  Kelly was in a panic as she had just emptied her memory card for a wedding and two family shoots that weekend so she had no copies.  She also didn't back them up in any other fashion as she doesn't have the funds for an external hard drive nor did she have a spool of DVDs on hand (which I have promptly remedied by getting her a spool of 50 for a gift from Best HEll...um I mean Best Buy... this past weekend).

She was preparing for the worst while I was convincing her it would be ok.  Yes this bride wasn't panicking but being scientific.  It wasn't her computer that crashed but a program.  So the hard drive should have been perfectly fine and she would just need software to recover the deleted files.  Sure enough, after 6 hours of scanning we recovered 4 folders of thousands of JPEGs and transferred them onto one of my external drives.  Recovered photos included our wedding, the other wedding, other shoots & any (and I mean ANY) picture that she happened to view on the net.  From her early estimates, Kelly thinks that around 85% have been recovered but she won't know until she goes through all of them.  And from what we saw, it appears that a variety of pictures from the entire day are still there.  The few that were damaged can be cropped to hide the grey boxes and the ones deleted forever shouldn't be missed as she got several shots of each photo.  =)

All in all, a possible disaster has been reversed and serves as an almost awful lesson for a new photographer that copies of originals are key.  Which was one of the things I tried to remind Kelly as she kept fretting about the pictures.  Amazingly enough I wasn't worried at all...  I had the instant of panic and tightness in my chest when she first told me but then remembered the multiple times my labmate's hard drive(s) have died and he's recovered all his files.   So I was quite hopeful that we could do the same with hers.  After talking to my PI about the possibility of recovery, I was assured that we'd get at least some of the photos back so to see we got so many is a true blessing.  Plus it doesn't hurt that we had a bunch of friends sending good vibes and prayers our way.  ;)  So....  in light of all the photographic chaos, I thought I'd share the initial 10 teasers our photographer shared a week back before the mishap.