Photo recovery status

I spent all week (all week -- not kidding) searching for my missing files. To no avail, I did not find them. I cried and I drank a lot of wine. For some reason that helped me keep from thinking about my huge huge mistake. Whatever helps, I guess.

I'm feeling better because I have talked to 4 out of the 5 clients and they have all been understanding. I am so lucky. One was of my friend, Lindsay's, maternity pictures. And she had the baby on Monday. There's no "redoing" of those pictures. I was really feeling sick to my stomach about hers. I also missed her birth which I was suppose to shoot. Baby came so fast I wouldn't have made it because I had my kids and needed to drop them off someplace first. But I still feel awful about missing the birth and now having lost her maternity pictures. I'm so lucky she is who she is.

But it's times like these that I still really hate digital photography. I don't care how good of a photographer you are or how organized you are, it's still possible for anyone to do what I did. I'm glad I did it now and not later . . . like with a wedding. I have learned my lesson: download all photos as soon as I get to my office. My mistake: forgetting to download so I assumed the cards I had in my card wallet were ones that had already been downloaded. So I lost over 800 photos.

Just had to update on my bad news. While it's still bad, it definitely could have gone way worse. I have one more client to tell tomorrow. I hope it will be just as easy with her. (Not that telling was easy. That was really really hard. It was like telling someone I had ran over their dog. The easy part was the responses I heard.) And now I have to re-shoot everything. There isn't time, but I'd rather be able to keep these clients and be swamped than to not have them anymore and feel miserable about that.