Storytime: That Time When I Thought I’d Lost an Entire Event’s Worth of Photos
COREDLE, Georgia (March 25, 2022) – Back in January of 2022 I traveled to a small farming town in South Georgia. That town, Cordele, plays host to an annual event called SpeedFest. A co-sanctioned race between the Southern Super Series and the CRA Super Series, it marks the unofficial start to the super late model racing season. I was very excited to go.
Being late January, winter was still very much in effect. While there wasn’t snow on the ground, the temperatures were rather frigid. I’d venture to say that this race was the coldest I’d ever been at a race track. It. Was. Frigid.
The weather conditions were significant enough to alter the schedule a bit, with one feature being cut a little shorter and the entire time table being shifted up in an effort to get the day’s events finished before the cold evening took hold of the area.
That said, it was still cold. As I walked onto the speedway for the first time, I was introduced to my first issue of the day.
My memory card wouldn’t register in my camera. I took it out, put it back in, still nothing. Okay. Switch cards. Same thing. Thinking it was because of the cold, I blew into the camera’s SD card slot in the same way one would blow into their hands to stay warm. I guess it worked, because the next try of the card worked. Great. Now I’m off and running.
The day was fun, but long. It was an effort to shoot photos at this race. Needing my hands to operate the camera effectively, my day was filled with “how long can I shoot before I need to warm up my hands again?”.
Now, I’m not trying to complain. It wasn’t impossible, and not as bad as being up north, but for someone from the Florida Panhandle, it was a bit of a challenge.
Overall, the day went very well and over the course of the day I was able to send photos from my camera to phone via wifi to post online. Cool.
Then, it was time to call it a day, head back to the hotel, dump my memory card onto my laptop and write my post race recap.
Well, when I went to download my photos I was greeted with…. Nothing. A few files that were unviewable. Okay. I pulled the card out and put it back in, thinking it just wasn’t in all the way. This time, I got an error message that said the file was inaccessible.
What?
I did a quick search, and soon realized that I must have a corrupted SD card.
Dammit. This was my first. I’ve always been really good about backing up data and taking precautions to ensure nothing is lost, but this only works once you make that first copy from the originals. I couldn’t get that far.
As far as I knew, the only photos I had were those I had downloaded onto my photo over the course of the day to post on social media.
I should’ve felt devastated by losing somewhere near 1,500 photos, but I wasn’t. I figured that the cold weather caused something to malfunction and this was just bad luck. I had enough of the lower resolution photos to use for my story, and while not happy, wasn’t going to let this incident ruin my otherwise very awesome trip to Watermelon Capital Speedway.
So I finished my article, got it posted and called it a day.
Fast forward almost a month. I’m preparing for the Alabama 200 at Montgomery Motor Speedway. I pulled out the card, which I thought was corrupt. Since the Cordele incident, I came across where you can simply reformat the card. You’ll still lose all the photos, but the card would probably be good to use again.
Prior to reformatting, for some reason, I decided to look and see if I could see the photos on the camera. Low and behold I could. Surprised, I decided to try it in the card reader on my computer one more time.
Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle… the photos were there!
Now, I don’t know what the deal was. My best guess is that either there was some condensation already in the card slot, or maybe some dirt on the contacts of the card. Some little thing that made the card unreadable, but cleared itself away a month later.
Whatever the cause, I was just happy to have my photos.
Being a month late, I decided to hold off on posting, instead saving those shots for the build up to my next trip to Cordele, which is right now!
Check out these “lost photos” on the PixelatedSPEED Facebook Page, and keep an eye for a fresh batch of shots from this weekend’s Georgia Spring Nationals at Crisp Motorsports Park.
If you’ve made it this far into my story, thank you. It means the world to me that you read this far.
I’m not really sure what I could have done differently, but I’m just very thankful to not have lost photos… which is still something that’s never happened to me…. “Knock on wood.”
- Daniel Vining, Twitter: @danielvining
- Photo: Daniel Vining/PixelatedSPEED.com
PixelatedSPEED.com is a motorsports-centric news and opinion website published by content creator Daniel Vining. The mission is simple; inform, entertain and inspire motorsports lifestyle enthusiasts using imagery and storytelling to capture news and history. If you’ve made it this far into the post, thank you. Please consider sharing this content on the interwebs and following PixelatedSPEED on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. Copyright PixelatedSPEED – 2018 – 2022
