Don't Panic!
I spent the third week of January in Yellowstone National Park. This was my first time visiting the park in winter. Winter is definitely the time to visit the park. The roads are all closed to everything except snowmobiles and snow coaches. This makes for a very enjoyable visit as you end up having most of the locations to yourself.
On Friday, we received special permission to access West Thumb. This is normally only accessible to the snowmobile tours. West Thumb is home to mostly pools, but the colors can be amazing. My favorite is sapphire pool.
Imagine my shock when I uploaded my photos and they all looked like the following:
Needless to say, I was not happy. Immediately thoughts start going through your head. The first was, Is my sensor going bad? Fortunately, I have seen this before. In the past, I have been able to reimport the images after resetting the card in the reader, and everything is fine. Not this time. I tried replacing the cable, same issue. This was not looking good.
Hoping that it was my card reader, after I returned home, I stopped by the local camera store (National Camera Exchange), and purchased a new card reader. I created a new catalog, and imported the images. Everything came in perfect. All the ugly lines were gone.
I went back to my original catalog and discovered something interesting. If I opened the corrupt image in Develop module, the lines magically went away. Not only that, but they stayed away. I'm not sure why this is the case, or what the cause is, but I am happy that my images were fine.
After cropping and converting to black and white, here is the result:
It would have been easy to give up, and assume that all the photos were bad. Instead, by trying different things, I ended up keeping all my photos. Remember that you always have options when things go bad. Different software programs convert images differently, card readers go bad, cables go bad, so keep on trying.
