Scenery with price of 3000 lost photos

            This photo has a story and an intangible price. I was in Latvia around Christmas, and on one of those days when there was a strong wind and I expected a nice sight of waves in the sea, I decided to visit our closest seaside town, Jurmala. 
The view was really picturesque, the clouds just started to reflect the pink tones of the approaching sunset, the half melted snow on the wet sand formed beautiful lines on the coast, and waves indeed made a lovely show. I so much enjoyed the view, I was really excited and took a good collection of photos, partly with my camera, and partly with my mobile phone. After some 30 minutes in the cold wind and temperature around zero I understood that my fingers were becoming completely numb. And then I noticed a light in the window of a cafeteria on the beach, in the middle of the vast sandy field.

I felt happy to get into the warmth, sit down, get a cup of warm drink, and get my fingers back to senses. Then I checked my phone, and discovered that its memory card (micro card) was full. I had just recently bought a new card, and I decided to change it. At the moment when I took the full tiny card out of phone, it slipped out of my hands and fell on the floor. But the floor was made from rough wooden boards with large gaps between them, and the boards were placed directly on the sand. And my memory card with more than 3000 photos, taken during more than two years, slipped somewhere in the gap in the sand. All the attempts to try to find and "fish" it out with forks was absolutely useless. I guess it must have looked extremely funny from aside when somebody was lying on the floor of the cafeteria poking the wooden boards with forks. 

It is hard to describe the spectrum of emotions I went through, but it definitely was stronger than the stormy sea that evening. When I finally understood that it is like trying to find a needle in a haystack, and the card won't be back, I started to calm down and think how big loss it actually was. Luckily, a big part of the photos have been backed up in Google photos. But the last batch, about 200 photos taken just recently in Latvia, was fully lost, because Google back up does not work while I am travelling in another country. So I only had some of similar photos that I luckily have been taking with my Canon camera. They are not the same; even light conditions look quite different in phone and in camera photos, but at least I still had some images of the scenes I was so eagerly enjoying and photographing. 

So, this is one of the saved photos from that afternoon after the loss of 3000 other photos. Valuable image, is not it? :-) 

P.S. To add to the fun of this story I have to mention that my Canon camera is a bit old and seems to get Alcheimer: it always forgets what date it is. Every time I turn it on it asks me: Tell me again, what date is today? Or, actually, it asks every time to set the date anew, and if I am too lazy or in rush  to repeat it again and again, it just takes by default January 1980. So you are mislead by the date! I neither did have camera back then, nor I knew how to take photos, and I even guess this model of camera even was not yet produced. :-)

Taken on: January 1, 1980

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