Kurtis Hough of Portland, Oregon made this informative step-by-step video on how you can quickly lose $2,400 in just 24 seconds. It was shot using a Canon 5D Mark II.

On September 2nd, a woman in Northern California named Debbie Payne heard a loud crash and, upon investigating, found a smashed Canon 24-105mm lens on the ground and a gaping 9-inch hole in her roof. Now the police department in Petaluma is trying to figure out how the lens apparently fell from the sky.
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There’s a well known photography joke that goes, “If you saw a man drowning and you could either save him or photograph the event, which lens would you use?” While it’s certainly morbid and pretty absurd, there’s plenty of examples of photographers having a “shoot first” mentality in a time of crisis. The rally racing photographer seen in this video provides one such example.

When Mirco Wilhelm tried to log into his Flickr account yesterday, he was surprised to find that his 5-year-old Pro account with roughly 4,000 photographs had completely vanished. It then dawned on him that only a week earlier he had reported another account for posting stolen photographs.
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My buddy Kyle and I were traversing a mountain road near my home town of Tillamook, Oregon. I am intending to create a tour company that will comprise of local tours in and around the Tillamook County area. We have many beaches, mountains, rivers and bays here and I intend to show people. Without getting too off-track, we were heading up into the mountains on a gravel logging road to calculate mileage and timing for a tour. A road I’d been on regularly as I had worked for the state department of forestry for a number of years. Eventually we came to a freshly repaired washout, where a landslide had completely deleted the road in that particular drainage. The washout had created the most amazing view of the Tillamook valley, a reservoir lake and some mountains with intense directional light catching every crag. I was compelled to take a photo so I might use it on a future brochure.
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This poor wedding photographer wasn’t looking at where he was going and, as a result, caused a huge commotion and likely ruined his pricey gear. On the plus side, he’s probably learned to make note of his surroundings for the rest of his life. Hopefully the photographs survived.

(via DigitalRev)

Imagine you snap out of unconsciousness and realize you’ve been in a pretty serious accident. You have no memory of what happened, but luckily you were wearing a motorcycle camera that was filming your ride. That’s exactly what happened to a guy in Kashmir recently. The 51 second video above sent chills down his spine when he first watched it after the accident. The footage became the memory he lost in an accident in which he miraculously only suffered a broken leg. Don’t worry, the video isn’t graphic — just jaw-dropping.

Photographer Petra Hall‘s fiancé recently bought a used MG convertible right before going on a vacation. However, on the way back from work the weekend before the vacation was to begin, something in the car exploded and the car went up in flames.

The list of gadgets in the car is enough to make a grown man weep: a Canon 7D, a Canon 24-105L lens, and a MacBook Air. Everything burned up.
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A few times in the past I’ve had to recover data from memory cards. Once it was a friend who accidentally reformatted the card and deleted hundreds of photographs from a recent vacation. Another time I accidentally deleted precious images from the memory card before I had backed them up. What I’ve learned though, is that in most cases, you can easily recover the data you fear was lost, even if you do something drastic such as reformat your card.

When you “delete” a photo from your memory card, it simply goes to that section of storage and marks it as “available” to be used again. The data of the original image is still there on your memory card, though the camera will not display it as an image. Thus, the most important thing you need to remember to do if you accidentally delete data is to stop using the memory card. This is because the only way for the data to truly become unrecoverable is if you delete it, then overwrite it with new data (or even blank data). Thus, to ensure that you can recover your deleted photo, you need to be sure to stop using your card immediately to ensure that nothing is written to that storage location on the card.

To do the actual recovery, you could take the card to a photography place and have a professional recover the data for you, but I’ve always relied on free software that can do the same thing. Here are some popular and free programs to try:

• Recover Files by Undelete & Unerase, Inc.
  Size: 1.16MB
  OS: Windows
• Pandora Recovery by Pandora Corp.
  Size: 3.12MB
  OS: Windows
• Digital Photo Recovery by Art Plus
  Size: 1.29MB
  OS: Windows

Most of the good, safe, and free programs available for recovering photos are available only for Windows users. PhotoRescue is a popular program for Mac users, but costs $29.

Finally, the fact that data is so easily recoverable means that you need to be careful when selling things like computers and memory cards. Simply “deleting” data will not prevent what was on the card to fall into the wrong hands. If you’re selling a memory card that contained data you don’t want others to possibly recover, then be sure to overwrite the card completely, or look online for a program that helps you safely delete data.