Beyond Nature – People Portraits and a Forgetful Memory CardPosted by drfl on August 9th, 2010

Ever since I purchased my 135 f/2, I just can’t get over how great this lens is.  For quality, it is by far the best lens I own.   Period.  It’s just too bad it’s extremely limited in focal length.  Achieving focus through this lens is truly magical.  I have been able to focus in situations and conditions that I never was able to do previously.  Capturing young children can be a difficult task.  Besides being moving targets, they are almost completely unpredictable.  Trying to get them to pose is like asking a tornado to stop, it’s just not going to happen.  Anyway, while I always try to capture the poses, my favorite images of kids are those where they are playing and where they do not care that I am even there. 

Last Friday, my sister-in-law, Kayla and my nephew, little Tommy went out for a park photo-shoot.  We tried for the poses, but ultimately we just let him run around.  Being the kid paparazzi that I am, I managed quite a few shots.  Shortly after, I went home and began my download of the images.  I slid the card into the reader, browsed to the directory and realized that there were several folders of gibberish.  I was able to get about 20% of my images directly off the card, but the rest had been corrupted!  I’ve heard of such things happening, but in my 5 years of digital photography, I’ve never seen it.  (I routinely rotate old cards out so that I hopefully wouldn’t).  The card had only been used a handful of times, so I knew that retrieving the photographs may be possible.  I loaded up a copy of Lexar Image Rescue that I had received when I purchased one of their cards (The card that I was recovering from was manufactured by SanDisk), I set the program to scan and retrieve all images.  It found a couple of hundred TIFs, but when I retrieved them and changed the extension, viola, my RAW images were back!  Needless to say that rookie card is going into forced retirement.

Here are 3 of the memorable moments that I retrieved.

Technical Details:
Canon 5D, 135 f/2 lens