Lost camera found in river 13 years later – SD card still works

Socks, sunglasses, cars in multi-level car parks – many everyday things are often lost or misplaced to no real effect. But lose your camera... with all your precious memories in it – that stuff is irreplacable. Of course, you could reenact your wedding shot for shot – but it wouldn't really be the same.

Thirteen years ago, Coral Elise Amayi was rafting down the Animas River, Colorado when 'bloop' – the water swallowed up her 7.1 Megapixel Olympus 790 SW camera. Gutwrenchingly, many fond memories including a wedding and bachelorette party had seemingly been lost forever.

Years later, Spencer Griener (local fishing enthusiest & all round nice guy) discovered the camera in the mud while fishing. After pouring the water out of the now destroyed camera, he booted up the SD card and to his surprise it unveiled Corals images.

Realising the important personal value to the images, he posted some of the found photos to a local Facebook community page and within the hour he was contacted by a very happy owner.

It's incredible how physically durable most memory cards are. The thing that really causes them to fail is that there is a limited number of writes to NAND flash memory. So, as a photographer, if you are using an SD or CF Express card for shoots that require intensely high amounts of images (sport, weddings, etc) you may think about labelling the card with an inception date and then 'retiring' it after a few years. Those old cards can still be used as 'transfer cards' between computers or as extra backup.