Have you ever had one of those days when it seems like nothing is going right? I’m a photographer who recently made the leap from amateur to professional and my first gig for a major magazine ended with me desperately searching for the phone number of a hard drive data recovery company. That wasn’t how I’d pictured my debut as a pro photographer (no pun intended), but it’s made for some interesting stories. While it could have ended a lot worse than it did, the episode taught me that a professional carries a fistful of memory cards at all times and considers membership with a data recovery program a crucial business requirement.
I don’t want to jinx my career or anything like that, so I’m not going to tell you the name of the magazine I was working for, but suffice it to say that it’s been around for a very long time and it’s one of the most prestigious assignments a photographer can land. I got lucky, thanks to knowing the woman who was responsible for writing the feature for which I was providing the photos. When I stepped into the charter plane that was taking us into the wilderness of Alaska, the last thing on my mind was hard drive recovery.
My job was to photograph Grizzly Bears as they were fishing for salmon. Sounds exciting -and it was- but also very dangerous. Any bear is something to be wary of and grizzlies are huge. I was assured that with the salmon in full spawning season, the bears would be too busy to bother with me, but I was still nervous. I spent a week snapping shots, then on the day that the plane was due back to pick us up, I managed a spectacular photo of a bear standing up and swatting at a salmon that had leapt into the air. It was the shot that would be the highlight of the feature. Or would have been, except I slipped on a mossy rock and dropped my camera into the river. I was able to snag it before the current whisked it off (or a bear stepped on it), but it had been submerged and the damage was done.
I was cursing a blue streak, but the writer told me to take a deep breath and calm down. She said data recovery was a common issue in this line of work and she’d had more than one assignment where the photographer’s camera was dropped, sprayed with water or even trampled by an elephant.
“Drive Savers is your best friend,” she said. “They don’t just do hard drive data recovery. If you go onto their web site, you’ll see they’re a Professional Photography Association (PPA) sponsor and they’re authorized to undertake hard drive recovery and data recovery by all major camera, computer and memory card manufacturers.” She was right, I was able to recover the photo and now I’m a regular with the magazine.