June 19, 2005
Cameras and cards
I was at my cousin's wedding yesterday, which was a thoroughly enjoyable event. It was marred only by technical hitches with my camera.
After the experience of sorting through 600+ photos from the holiday, my dad and I agreed that only one of us would take a camera to this event, so I took my Kyocera S3. Not to mention that my dad had accidentally formatted his camera's card when the battery died, so I had his card in my laptop with MediaRecover trying to undelete pictures of my nephew's birthday.
So, it was a beautiful day, the sun was shining, the bride looked radiant, etc etc. And then about half-way through the post-ceremony photo opportunity, my camera came up with the words: "Media corrupted". Argh!
The card in my camera is a 512mb MMC card. I used to carry around two 32mb MMC cards, but with 512mb it seemed redundant. For a moment I thought all was lost - and then I realised my mobile phone had a 32mb MMC card in it. I quickly whipped the card out of the phone, put it in the camera, and carried on shooting. When that card was full, I remembered that my sister's phone had a 128mb MMC in it, so I borrowed that and put it in my camera.
From the jaws of disaster I snatched success, and I now have a load of really entertaining photos. The excellent MediaRecover is hard at work on my corrupted card, and has found 48 more photos so far.
What have I learnt? It pays to stick with one format of media in all your devices. And it never hurts to invest in a good undelete program...