Check out this photo of a Rock Bridge High School wrestler I took last semester:
Rock Bridge High School junior Josh Gaskins weight-trains before starting wrestling practice on Monday, Dec. 7 at Rock Bridge. Gaskins, who weighs 152 pounds, wants to be at 148 pounds by the end of the season.
Now, check this out:
This kind of banding and displacement within the photo freaked me out earlier tonight, when I was going through old photos. I didn’t know what happened to the file, and i t wasn’t just this photo shoot, either.
It happened with an informal photo shoot with Chelsea…
…as well as quite a few photos from an assignment about rural-area doctors…
… and many photos from other shoots and assignments I shot within a week and a half in November and December.
At first, I thought perhaps it was my camera. I ruled that out when I remembered all the photos I’ve shot with it this semester and that they’d turned out fine.
Then I thought maybe my data on my external hard drive was degrading, which really frightened me. I’ve already experienced hard drive failure this year, and I would really rather not have to deal with that again — especially with a larger drive.
Then Jeff suggested perhaps it was Adobe Bridge, which I was using, that was corrupting the image files. I opened up the same folder (which, fortunately, is a duplicate containing many photos that I already had copied elsewhere) in Photo Mechanic, but the photos continued corrupting before my eyes.
I was ready to turn off my hard drive until I could resolve the issue — and then Jeff remembered my 4GB memory card that had begun erasing data in late November and that I discontinued after I found out.
It’s pretty odd that the files in the other folders remain good and that only the files in this folder were corrupted. But it makes sense that it was that memory card, since only photos taken in that relatively small time period were affected.
Missouri vs. Oregon.
So yeah. Pretty weird. Let this just be a lesson: If your memory cards start acting wonky, stop using them.
In the meantime, I’m glad the duplicate files remain intact. And although they’re entirely unusable, these photos are pretty fun to look at, at least!
Words and Light 
Yikes.
Pretty much.
DON’T USE CORRUPTED MEMORY CARDS.
And thank goodness for duplicate files.
Yeah those are pretty neat. There’s actually a group on flickr devoted to stuff like this. The crazy part is that some of them actually try to induce it.
Did it look completely normal on the camera?
This was all a while ago, but I do remember chimping a few times and it seemed normal on the camera. And the photos I filed onto the Missourian server are fine, as are the duplicate copies on this same hard drive. I don’t remember how I caught on to the fact that the memory card was starting to corrupt files, though.
Haha, figures some people try to fake it! Maybe I should join that Flickr group…
Weird.
I do really like the effect on the Missouri vs. Oregon. photo. It looks like something that would have been done for a poster back in the late 70’s.