Hello everyone.

For this image I take us into the highways of the sky, back to a world I know so well, back into something of a real emergency in my studio the other night.

“Airway 401″

Highway 401 runs along the Nothern shore of Lake Ontario, connecting the Canadian cities of Toronto and Montreal. An airway follows the same path, only a little wider and thankfully somewhat higher. It is one I’ve travelled several times, flying at over 1000km/hour and leaving those annoying little trails of white water vapour behind.

Last week, the sun had just set, and my final images were made with my lens pointing into the sky south of nearby Belleville. Pressing the shutter I recorded the various states of contrail decay to the sensor in my camera, which in turn passed the 19mb of RAW data onto one of my older compact flash cards. It appeared to load onto my Hard Drive OK, until…….

… this rather worrying message appeared on my screen.

Now, in my life as a pilot, responsible for the safety of all the passengers and crew, protecting them from those little snags that try to spoil your day was kind of high on my “things to do at work” agenda. In fact, the first priority was to spot the snags in advance and avoid them, but none the less, there’d still be a few “moments” to sort out from time to time.

 

And after trying several other things I realized that I’d encountered a photographic “moment” some kind of compact flash card failure, the digital photographers equivalent to having an engine pack up on your airliner…, maybe not…, well losing your suitcase anyway.

Fortunately help is at hand. When things go wrong, people realize that there is money to be made in making it right. So, in exchange for a small fee, ($40 - $80 is typical) a variety of data recovery programmes are just waiting for you to click “download” so they can come to your rescue and save the day.

detail of the sky

Having thought that this may one day happen, I already had one such programme, well at least I thought I did! Lexar bundled their “Image Rescue 3″ onto some pro CF cards last year and I’d picked one up to fill my data requirements. But sadly no amount of searching could locate it on my HD, however thanks to a few emails the kind folks at Lexar sent me an attachment containing another copy!

Anyway it did the trick and recovered most of the data. In fact there were still a few problems, for example this image will still not open as a raw file in Capture NX, but I could open it Nikon View and make a TIFF, tasks that had been impossible prior to recovery.

So when things go pear shaped, and at some point they will, don’t panic. Read the manual, call the supplier, Cry “Mayday” on the forums!! Explain your situation and there will be someone who can help.

Steven

More images at www.stevendraperphotography.com