I miss the analog world I grew up in. I miss the tactile feel of real film, developed with chemistry, and I miss working in a darkroom where I can see the images emerge from nothing, and where my hands were on the media throughout the entire process. However I have learned to embrace the digital realm we’ve arrived at and I have fallen for techniques and processes that simply cannot be accomplished with film, but one of the things that really irks me about digital is the absolutely fragile nature of the 1’s and 0’s. You know what I’m talking about: corrupt media, incompatible data, “the Avalanche Effect”, or, in real world terms: card falls in lake, bakes in the desert sun, is worn down, or simply mishandled. In short: a lot of hard work has simply vanished. I’m not in the habit of endorsing products but if you work in digital photography, you need to know about PhotoRescue3.
Occasionally you come across a product that is so impressive that you want everyone to know about it, and PhotoRescue3 is one of those products, in fact it is so good the developers don’t want you to have to pay for it unless it can prove to you that your images can be recovered. This just tells me the developers are interested in creating a quality product that simply works.
My sister, who is a fashion photographer in Chicago called me after a shoot recently to say that the SD card she pulled from her Nikon camera and mounted on her Mac was inexplicably showing up as an empty card. Even after putting it back in the camera, it came up as empty. She knew there was data on the card, but somehow between the camera and the card reader on her Mac, it had gotten lost. I suggested she try PhotoRescue 3. She downloaded the free trial version which determined there were in fact images on the card by showing her an accurate preview of the recoverable images–in her case, all of them. So she paid $29 to activate the full version of the software–a pittance in comparison to a re-shoot, and downloaded the images, backed them up and was editing away in no time.
The developers claim that this product may even be able to recover images from a card you erased by mistake, and it recovers movie files as well. You may not need PhotoRescue right now, or ever, but you need to know it is available should the unthinkable happen.