Male polar bear on thin sea ice, Beaufort Sea, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska. Canon 500mm f/4L IS II, 1/1600 sec @ f/4, ISO 500.
During an October photo tour that I guide in Alaska’s Arctic, one of my type II flash cards got corrupted during a Lightroom import. I recently received it in the mail from www.datarecovery.com and had a chance to look at the pictures contained within. However, that process did not turn out to be a simple one. When attempting to import them into Lightroom on my iMac via a flash card reader (I tried two different ones), I kept getting errors about an inability to read data on the type II flash card. In the Mac Finder window, I could see some thumbnails of the RAW files, and other ones were either black or had a partial black preview. Some imported fine, others did not.
So as a work around, I grabbed an old PC laptop and copied them directly from the type II flash card reader on to the laptop’s hard drive. Then I copied them back onto an SD card, which I could later insert directly into my iMac without using a card reader. I then copied them from the SD card to the iMac desktop, and from there imported them into Lightroom with no problem. I have not spent much time trying to figure out why all of this was necessary, I just know it worked.
The reason I was so intent on recovering these images was that I remembered a particular moment when the light was gentle and warm, as it washed over the back of a male polar bear walking on the thin sea ice. What was also very distinct about this set of photos was the very low angle perspective, literally eye-to-eye with this beautiful bear. This was possible because the bear was walking along the newly formed sea ice and we were in a small boat in a section of open water. Situations like this are a rare opportunity.
The flash card will certainly get retired, and I’ll get yet a third flash card reader to use in the future just to be safe. If there are any computer geeks out there that might have insight, feel free to chime in.
Male polar bear on thin sea ice, Beaufort Sea, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska. Canon 500mm f/4L IS II, 1/1000 sec @ f/4, ISO 500.
Male polar bear on thin sea ice, Beaufort Sea, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska. Canon 500mm f/4L IS II, 1/1600 sec @ f/4, ISO 500.
