I was cleaning out my mom’s house, we’re selling it, and I came across a tea kettle I got from China. In 1988 I spent the summer in China, it may be hard to believe but it was the era of glasnost and China was similarly opening up, even talking about past tragedies like the Cultural Revolution. This wouldn’t last. In 1989, well, a bad thing happened and we got the China we have today. I was a freshman in high school and I really didn’t understand what I had witnessed until the next year when I was glued to CNN. In China, I had a Nikon Coolpix point and shoot and I took so many pictures, maybe 15 to 20 rolls of pictures from the Forbidden Palace and Tiananmen square (yeah about that) to the Great Wall to the Terra Cotta soldiers to the Yurts of Inner Mongolia to the hustle and bustle of the emerging super city of Shanghai. I went everywhere. We left for Hong Kong back to the states and I dutifully stuffed my film in my checked bag, so the film would not be subjected to the X Ray machine. I would never see that bag or my film ever again. I’m mostly venting, but I bet there were some amazing photos on that film, those pictures documented a China flirting with openness, that seems so far off now. Anyone else lose photos that meant a lot to them?
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Oddly, I have a situation that is the diametrically opposite of yours: in 1995 I went on solo bicycle trip across vast areas of China in 3 months. I carried two Nikon FM-2 bodies, one was always loaded with slide film, the other with b/w. I also did lots of sound recordings there. While I created a carefully curated slide show for private audiences, all I did with the dozens of b/w rolls was to develop & archive them. I didn’t even produce contact sheets of them for a cursory examination. I just have that hidden treasure. I can’t explain.
A decade or so ago (God, has it really been THAT long?), I lost the archive DVD that had most of my first three years of photos on it. Lots of memories with family and friends went poof.
Hope you learned from it and are now backing everything up in 3-2-1 fashion.
Three copies of your data, two local (on-site) but on different media (read: devices), and at least one copy off-site.
I experienced that on a trip to Japan. I filled up a 32GB card for the first two thirds of the trip including Oita, Osaka Kyoto and Hiroshima and put it away for the next card. When I got home the card had disappeared and I looked everywhere and called the lost and founds in three airports with no luck. So I eventually accepted that I was a dumbass who didn’t secure the card enough. So many great memories in photos and video…
Then two months later I’m looking in my bowl of reader glasses and I see a card at the bottom. I thought it was a new one I’d just bought and just for the heck of it I’d look to see if anything was on it. And damnit it was the missing Japan photos! I don’t know if I’ve even been happier!
So I had the deep loss and enrapturing discovery!
All of my wedding night, and honeymoon photos. Including the first 3 months of my marriage. I packed the camera in a suitcase and someone stole it.
Yup that’s what happened to me, someone stole my suitcase out of the Hong Kong airport. Lost the camera too and all the gifts I got my family. It’s the photos I miss the most, my mom didn’t care about the gifts and I managed to stuff a few in mu carry on so it wasn’t a total loss.
Not my own, but I didn’t get to see the 100 sheets of 4x5 Fuji film that were shot by a well known car photographer that I accidentally spoiled in the darkroom as a young film processing tech in the 1980s. He didn’t get to see them either nor did the readers of Car and Driver where the photos were scheduled to be published. Not a very fun phone call that the lab owner made me make that day.
Ouch. Lab owner should have been on top of you or helping if they were that important though. Lol
In 1994 / 1995 I was in the US Navy aboard the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower. We ported in UAE, Greece, Spain, Italy, Israel, France, etc. I saw many amazing things and took hundreds of pictures of things that I’ll never see again and some things that don’t even exist anymore.
In 2018 we had a flood due to hurricane Florence and almost every photo / negative I’ve ever taken in my life was destroyed, along with almost everything else that I owned. :(
I used some very expired film on a trip to DC. Lab developed it and said it came out blank. Finally got to scanning my negatives a year later and for fun, I digitized those negatives. I have some very faint images. Not the greatest, but better than not having them at all.
Also, twice I went outside with my camera without first loading an SD card. I don’t think I got amazing pictures, but I’ll never know since my camera doesn’t warn you if you don’t have an SD card loaded.
Check your camera’s menu settings; some (like my Fuji) have an option to alert you. Why some (like my Fuji) default to no alert is beyond me!
If I use the LCD back screen I would have noticed. But I usually don’t and so there was no warning.
My wife (then girlfriend) and I went on a trip to Honk Kong with our college friends. The trip was a week long so there were a ton of photos. I don’t remember how it happened but we lost the sd card. It sucks because we’re all older and living in different countries, and raising families so the chances of us getting together like that again is basically zero.
I’m mostly venting, but I bet there were some amazing photos on that film, those pictures documented a China flirting with openness, that seems so far off now.
Oh man, sorry you went through that.
Anyone else lose photos that meant a lot to them?
My first trip to Taiwan. I had a blast and loved it. Took tons of photos.
After I got back home, my camera got stolen out of my backpack when I wasn’t looking. I was so pissed off and hurt.
On the bright side, that was another nudge that led me to move to Taiwan. Where I would take many more pictures than I lost. Lived there for several years.
Another time was I spent the day exploring the temples of Sukhothai in Thailand. I had a memory card in my camera. I had a full memory card in my pocket.
When I got back to my guesthouse at the end of the day, I dipped my hand into my pocket to get the full memory card–and nothing!
By then, it was too late and too dark to look for it.
Next day I revisited all the temples and retraced my steps, inspecting the ground everywhere. At the last temple, I finally found the memory card on the ground.
This was during a months-long backpacking trip around Southeast Asia, so there were loads of photos on that memory card.
I was so relieved to get it back.
Also, twice I went outside with my camera without first loading an SD card. I don’t think I got amazing pictures, but I’ll never know since my camera doesn’t warn you if you don’t have an SD card loaded.
The funny thing is, I didn’t really realize what I had lost until much, much later. I had pictures of China on the precipice of dramatic, historic change. And I was there at a moment where they had disavowed Mao’s Cultural Revolution and there were halting attempts at being more open, attempts that would end less than a year after I was there. Those pictures would be so awesome to see.
I found an old box brownie in a charity shop when I was in college, at the height of my interest in medium format. I was so excited that I’d found another camera I could have some fun with.
I’d gone out a couple times with it and it worked perfectly, mostly test shots and fairly simple street photography.
Then I managed to take a trip to Berlin, I loved the idea of photographing the Brandenburg gate and a few other historic landmarks in black and white on my glorified pin-hole camera.
I filled the roll, wound it up, left it in the camera and got back home.
I then completely forgot about developing the roll until about 3 years later when I was in university. I hadn’t developed a roll of film myself for around the same amount of time at this point so I completely forgot to turn off the red light in the darkroom, processed the film and it was pure black.
Tldr : I’m stupid, forgot to turn light off when processing film
I took the advice of the photographers of Nat Geo and Playboy, to never pack your exposed film in your luggage. Then to use the lead lined bags to protect them from x-rays.
Alas, security (way pre TSA) turned up the power to see through the bag. Streaks and spots galore.
After that it was simple zip locks and request for hand search.
So many stories of data loss. And so many people are oblivious with the risks. It’s just a matter of time before they will lose their photos and videos. I warn everyone around me but no one takes me seriously. It kind of feels wrong, but I hope they lose their data sooner rather than later to learn their lesson… Because learning it later is more painful and it’s bound to happen to everyone eventually.
When traveling, I shoot with redundant cards and usually find opportunities throughout the day to download JPGS to my phone to upload lower resolution backups to Google Photos. Then, I make a copy on a flash drive each night and begin uploading to my NAS at home. Internet connection at hotels is sometimes slow, so I have a travel router that stays at the hotel and keeps uploading even when I’m out the next day. My NAS has 2 disk redundancy and runs nightly off-site backup to a local drive and to my other 2-disk redundant NAS at my parents. My always-on desktop also automatically pulls from the NAS and uploads image backups to my unlimited Amazon Photos account and to SmugMug constantly. Ever since Google cracked down on the unlimited Drive storage with the business accounts, I need one more cloud storage solution, but haven’t made that decision yet. When I get home, I triple check everything is saved and backed up before mentally feeling settled. Still, I won’t clear the SD cards for as long as possible.
I had all the photos of my kid as a baby in his first 6 months on a CD/DVD. ~15 yrs later pulled out all my old CDs from somewhere and was transferring them to my HD when that CD cracked in the CD drive. Old CDs can’t handle the faster spinning drives. Tears for days (and sometimes still).
Due to the Russian attack on my country, I lost not only my photos, but also my collection of film cameras, which were left in Crimea and were stolen. I have only a few films left from the time before 2014, and then only by a coincidence of circumstances.
Wow my apologies to you, and go fuck yourselves Mother Russia.
We will definitely defeat the barbarians, I will return home to the Crimea and take many more beautiful photos on film, and the collection… Well, let it be down their throats.
The heart breaks. I had a camera bag stolen while I was at dinner by a little girl in Madrid while I was in High School just a couple years later than your '89 experience (I thought I was doing a good job securing the bag beneath my seat - a nine year old proved me less worldly than I thought I was). Probably a half dozen rolls of exposed film and my mid-80s Canon AE-1 were in that bag. sad times.