During my recent trip to Yellowstone, I was delighted to witness a wolf passing through a field and later that same day, watch a grizzly cross a body of water. With a 500mm lens attached to my camera in both instances, I attempted to grab some shots. For me, it is rare to see a wolf in the wild at a relatively close distance and I had never witnessed a grizzly swimming before. It was very exciting and I was glad I could document both of these events (btw, both the wolf and bear were wearing tracking collars). It was a long day and I was tired and looking at another very early morning the next day. I thought I would prepare my equipment before heading to bed. Now whether due to extreme tiredness, fuzzy thinking, or just having a senior moment, I actually formatted my SD card in the camera and soon realized I had not downloaded my images first… let’s say I wasn’t very happy with that realization.

After returning home from the trip, I was relaying the story to my nephew, Matt Hazlett, who mentioned he had a photo recovery software app on his computer. He took my SD card and was able to recover many of the images I took that day. The software he used recovered the images in JPEG format so I could not get back raw files but a JPEG is much better than nothing!!

Neither of these images are great shots but I was just trying to document these events and I am very happy to have ‘found’ these shots for my personal archive. The morale of this story, “DOWNLOAD AND BACKUP YOUR IMAGES BEFORE FORMATING YOUR CARD!” However, in the unfortunate event that you accidentally delete images, don’t despair. First, do not use that card to take more photographs, and second, search for a photo recovery software app for your computer system, you just might be able to find your lost images.