that's odd...

[nartreb]

I recently was taking photos of a young lady by a lake, proudly pointing up to a mountain she'd just climbed, when a passerby offered to take a photo of the two of us. We accepted. Twenty seconds later we were reviewing the shot on the viewscreen of my camera. We thanked him and he went back to his truck.
That evening when I uploaded my photos from the CF card to my computer, that shot had vanished! It's not that it failed to transfer or was deleted on my computer: there was an unbroken numbering sequence between the last shot I'd taken at the lake, and a shot I'd taken later in the day.

Anybody have something like this happen to them? I might not even have noticed this if it had happened with a different shot. Is it the card or the camera? Remember that we did review the shot while it was on the card in the camera. I don't think it's possible for me to have accidentally pressed the three-button sequence needed to delete the photo in camera, and I don't suspect the young lady (the camera doesn't leave my sight, and besides, she'd have deleted the one of her grimacing while trying to chew a granola bar).

Something that may or may not be related: with increasing frequency I've been seeing "error 99" when I first turn on the power of my camera - seems to happen if I try to do something (like change the exposure) without allowing half a second for the camera to complete its bootup process. Turning the camera off and back on clears the error.

 

[David Metsky]

If there was a card problem (most likely) taking pictures after the incident may have destroyed any evidence of the image. Take the card and put it in a card reader and try one of the free image recovery programs to see if there's anything left of that shot.

Since cards are so cheap, I'd just toss that one and get another. At least do a low level format.

 

[DougPaul]

Since the numbering is sequential, perhaps the camera failed to recognize the card. (I have read that some cameras will read the filenames on the card to pick the next number. So if the file wasn't written to the card, such a camera would reuse the file number.)

Perhaps the card wasn't properly seated, the contacts are bad, or, as Dave suggests, the card is defective and should be replaced.

Have you tried looking up error 99? The following search gets a number of hits: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...i=g1&aql=&oq=Canon+camera+"error+99"&gs_rfai= (Several of them suggest that it indicates a body-lens communication problem. Another suggests that it is a generic error for communications between the body and an accessory (eg lens, or card) http://www.erik-rasmussen.com/blog/2008/10/17/canon-error-99/ )

Some cameras can store some images in internal memory if there is no card. Presumably such images will be lost if you turn the camera off. (My guess is that the only way to recover them would be to download them to a computer before turning the camera off.)

Are you sure you weren't dreaming or hallucinating?

Doug