It's been a while I've done some proper event photography. This weekend I finally got around it again so I went to the Red Bull Air Race qualification day. I found the tickets quite expensive but it turned out to be well worth it! I can honestly say that I think Red Bull is on to something seriously awesome here. What started out as some small promotional thing has grown into a full world series in which some of the world's best pilots compete on crazy air race tracks all around the world. In London the race was held along the Thames river banks near the O2. Quite a spectacular environment for an event like this.

When I got home I was all excited about the pictures I took at the event. I think I shot about 3 gigs of raw material in order to compile a set of great shots to put on my Flickr. Then something horrible happened...

The files are f*cking gone!!!

I connected my Nikon D70 to my Macbook Pro through USB. Hmm.. nothing shows up. I pulled out the cable and inserted it again. Nothing. Starting to get slightly annoyed because this tends to happen a lot lately I pulled the cable out for a third time and inserted it again. Ah. There it is. But .... wait.... Where are my files???? I figured this was yet another case of my camera not correctly being recognized so I pulled out the cable again. To my horror I saw on my camera display that it was happily reporting 375 available shots in RAW, which means the CF card is empty!!!

After the initial shock and the feeling of utter defeat had gone I started looking for some solutions. I bumped into a little tool called PhotoRec. It can be downloaded here. It comes with another tool called TestDisk (a tool to recover lost partitions and more) and it's available for all operating systems. The tool is licensed under the GNU Public License and therefore absolutely free. I fired up PhotoRec, which is a bare bones commandline tool. After answering some questions (which disk, which filesystem etc.) it started crunching away for about half an hour. To my joy, all my pictures were recovered after it was done doing it's magic. Most excellent!

So, if you ever encounter the same horrific experience I had yesterday, make sure you have PhotoRec handy. It will most probably get your files back in a jiffy. And in contrast to the many other 'recovery tools' I found when looking for a solution this one is absolutely free!

Back to the photography

If you're into spectacular sports and the challenge of photographing these you shold definitely check out if the Red Bull Air Race is coming to a city near you at some point. Formula 1? Step aside! This race is a whole lot more spectacular and faster. During the race, big screens show live camera footage from within the cockpits so you can see the face of the pilot at all times. A superb addition to watching the aircraft race through the track. Thumbs up to Red Bull for a world class racing event!

Wanna see more?

If you want to see all my Red Bull Air Race pictures, head over to my set on Flickr and view them all. If I had plenty of cash to burn I guess I'd be at the race day today as well. Next year I'll definitely be there again!

Track Clear. Smoke on!