I'm a relatively new member and am hoping to find a way to reunite a lost camera with its owner. I've sent emails to the Custer and Gallatin National Forest Ranger Offices. Suggestions for other ways/forums where a connection might be made would be appreciated.

The camera was found along the shore of Cimmerian Lake on the Lake Plateau of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness on August 8. The camera appears to be fully functional. A review of the photos indicates that the last pictures were taken July 25. No information identifying the owner was found in the camera setup menus.

If you think the camera might belong to you or someone you know, send me a PM with information proving ownership (camera mfg, model, description of pictures, etc) and I'll speed it on its way back to you.

Maybe upload some pictures to http://www.ifoundyourcamera.net/.

You may have done this already, but if there's any sort of hiker's forum in that area (Montana) you might post there.

Last year my next-door neighbor was looking on the PCT hiker's forum just out of curiosity and saw a post regarding a lost camera. Pictures from the camera had been posted by the finder, and she recognized my boyfriend and I in the group of hikers! So she let me know about it; it had been a trip from 2 years previous, where our friend lost his camera the second day of a 5-day trip. The camera was non-functional, but the pictures were retrievable from the SD card (especially poignant, since that had been the last Sierra backpacking trip of a dear friend who died the following year of cancer and those were the only pictures taken of him on that trip).

Good luck finding the owner!

Craig,
Did you ever find the owner of the camera? If you haven't already, you might also want to take a look at the EXIF data to see if the owner added a name or contact info into the camera.

Mike

And, combining the last two thoughts, you could try a google image search on the photos in it.

Reminder to everyone: put a phone number on a little sticker on your phone, camera, etc. Sometimes honest people find the stuff you left behind.

I create a text file with my name, address and phone number that I copy over to my SD cards and CF cards. The information is not erased as part of the normal photo deletion process.

I suggest taking a picture of a business card or other contact information. Keep in mind that RAW files are not readable on all computers. A JPEG would be best.

Just use a handheld label maker (like a Brother or Dymo) and make a small label with phone and name and put it on the battery or inside on the battery door.

Or you can actually write on all SD/Flash cards your name and phone.

I've tried a number of things suggested here and elsewhere, but it's been nearly two months and nothing has worked so far. In addition to posting here, I put notices in the Flickr Lost and Found Camera and Photos group, IFoundYourCamera.net and CameraFound.com. If the owner looked on the internet, they couldn't miss it - a simple search turns up all of those. From watching the postings on these sites, there is a strange lack of "hits" from people who have lost a camera or a memory. It seems that it usually doesn't occur to people to try searching online.

I did review the pictures on the memory card and the EXIF data without finding anything useful. I also tried the image search as David suggested, but came up empty. An interesting variation I ran across had you upload an image from the camera so the search could scan for images with the same EXIF identification.

Certainly the suggestions offered here for making sure your camera can be traced back to you are good advice. In addition to the cost of the lost equipment, it's sad to think someone lost all those images. I hope they had backups.

Does Exif data also record a serial number? I'm not able to check at the moment. If so, I wonder if you could search Flickr for the serial number.

Exif data is a little inconsistent. Mine records a body number in there.

I'm not sure how you would get from there to the registered owner.

--B.G.--