Of Weddings, Broken Cameras and Answered Prayers

I was really excited about this wedding, two of my friends were getting married, it was an outdoor ceremony, Megan Decoteau of MRae Photography was flying up to help me shoot the wedding, I rented a fisheye lens, and I wasn't nervous at all.
But the day didn't go exactly as planned but God came through anyway.

Just as the pastor was pronouncing the couple as Mr. & Mrs. Beck and they were ready to walk down the aisle, my camera flashed an error message and stopped working. I found out later that the shutter had worn out. I was so glad to have Megan there to get the shots of the couple and wedding party coming back down the aisle. And praise the Lord for my cousin Ryan who was running the sound system and had his camera gear with him and let me borrow Nora, his Nikon D60.

The rest of the day seemed to go well, until I got home that night and finished loading pictures and going through them and I realized that I was missing all of my pictures from after the ceremony. I started frantically going through all of my SD cards again and making sure they didn't just get saved to a different folder. But the worst thing possible had happened, With several identical cards that were not all labeled, I had apparently formatted the card, thinking that I had already loaded it, when in fact, I had not.

I bought and downloaded a program called "CardRecovery" deciding it was probably a good business expense anyway. I didn't even know which card it had been, so I ran the program on all 5 of the cards I'd used that day, praying that I would find the pictures. But it was only bringing up pictures from a year ago.

Some of us girls had decided to go watch "Killers" at the theater. I tried to enjoy it but I kept thinking about my lost pictures. I knew Megan had gotten plenty of shots and this is why I have a second shooter. But I'd gotten some really, really good shots that I was excited about and I felt that being the main photographer I'd let down my friends who'd gotten married.

It was a pretty miserable night. I wanted to cry (and truth be told, I actually did.) My friend John McPherson of JM|Imagery called and told me his own horror stories of losing images and gave me some tips and the names of a few other programs to try.

At 1:30 a.m. I finally decided to try running the program one more time, I picked up a card, put it in the slot, started the program and went to take a shower. I prayed again that God would recover my images and promised to never format a card again until I saw every last one of my images on my hard drive and to label all of my cards.

After the shower I came out to check on my computer and saw that it had finished recovered over 400 pictures. I thought it must just be the pictures that it had recovered earlier. But when I checked the files, hallelujah they were all of my missing pictures!!
Everyone else in the house was asleep so even though I felt like screaming, I whispered "Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord."

So, hallelujah, our God is the God of lost images. =)

"The LORD said to Moses, 'Is the LORD's power limited?
Now you shall see whether My word will come true for you.'"
-Numbers 11:23

Here's some of my favorites so far: