Six days into my trip I had taken about 600 images, travelled about 600 miles, was getting into a routine of life in the camper and familiarising myself with DSLR photography again. I was living my best life, finding amazing things to photograph, wonderful places to stay overnight and developing a workflow and pattern for my photography. I had walked on Dornoch Beach, down the steps at Whaligoe, slept in forests and at lighthouses, visited a 4,500 year old village, watched the sunset and captured the waves as they pounded the rocks of the Atlantic Coast. Can you imagine the panic when my compact flash card wasn’t recognised by my card reader? I was heartbroken, thinking I had lost all my images. Some of them were rubbish, I was relearning techniques I haven’t used in years, but I wanted to look at them and learn. How had this happened? What could I do? It felt like the equivalent of forgetting to put film in the camera back in the day!!

Take a deep breath, continue with the trip, but take more photos on my phone just in case!

A bit of time spent on Google informed me that there was a photography shop in Kirkwall (capital of Orkney), surely they would be able to help. I got to Findlay’s Photo Shop at about 3.30 in the afternoon, and the man in there listened closely to my problem. He checked the card in his computer and printing machine but neither picked up any useful information. All was not lost, he sent me to a shop just down the road, Orkney Tech, in the hope that they would be able to help. In the meantime, I bought two SD cards for my camera, fortunately the Canon 5Dv4 has 2 card slots so I could continue capturing my adventure. Apparently SD cards are more robust and less prone to issues.

I arrived at Orkney Tech, explained my problem and the gentleman explained that they had some software that they could run the card through and try to retrieve my images. Cradling the card like it was precious cargo, he disappeared. All I could do was wait. It was approaching closing time. After 20 minutes, the man reappeared with good news. The software was picking up images, 20 so far. Could I come back tomorrow? They would leave the software running overnight and put any images retrieved on a pen drive.

So, I went back the next day and they presented me with a pen drive containing all my images, 720 of them. What a relief. It had captured everything including the utter rubbish I had deleted in camera, but I was so happy. Sorting them out gave me something to do when I was confined to the van during Storm Amy a week later, but that is a story for another day.

Many thanks to Findlay’s Photo Shop and Orkney Tech.

Disaster Averted!

4. A Big Reveal in the Howgill Fells.