A helping hand

One of my sets of images from Ayutthaya, Thailand got corrupted and I had to resort to dumping a full image of the card while sat outside a beautiful temple with people milling all around me. A similar problem happened to me while in Japan almost two years ago, which I fortunately managed to recover from. Using the very same Perl script I recovered 150 photos from the card (all of them, I believe), each around 5.5-6MB in size.

This script was designed to rescue only JPEG files, not the Nikon RAW files I was shooting in. This basically meant that I had now got combined RAW/JPEG files with a .jpeg extension. I briefly looked at the shots, thought little of them and promptly forgot (read: tried to put off the final step of the recovery) about them.

This evening I recovered every single shot by hand. This involved searching for a specific sequence of characters, splitting and saving to a new file. It didn't take too long and I'm very glad I did so. One of the shots I had previously ignored jumped out at me and I quickly cropped, sharpened, adjusted curves and messed with saturation and contrast. I am immensely pleased with the result... it's probably not the best from my holiday, but I think it has just become my favourite.

For once picking a suitable title was not difficult; it was as obvious as day. The bokkeh is outstanding (thanks Nikkor glass!) and while the focus is ever-so-slightly off I don't think this matters. I don't like to get all sentimental and lovey-dovey about photos (or anything, really) but I think the content here is outstanding, and I wish that somehow I had done something special to make it what it is... but I didn't. It was just there and I snapped at the right time.

So, here is "A helping hand":