Warning: Attempt this at your own peril.
While busy with class this past term, I accidentally let the battery in my Nikon Z9 run down. Usually, batteries are only mostly dead, and will charge back up. This one was beyond mostly dead. Nikon’s charger failed to recognize it at all, and it will blink furiously to let you know that you should immediately go to their website and purchase a new battery for $249. I had already done this a few months prior, and pulled out a spare (still in the box) only to find it, too, was entirely DOA – refusing to charge.
Most, if not all, Li-Ion chargers look for a small charge coming from the battery before it will recognize them. This helps prevent fires and electrocution from people doing dumb things, like putting the wrong battery on the charger, or sticking their tongue on the contacts Christmas Story style. The Nikon MH-33, however, seems to be designed for one purpose: to sell more batteries. My wife’s Canon, on the other hand, happily charges batteries that have been sitting dead in her drawer for years without any issues. Nikon seems to deliberately be built with poor tolerances for the range of voltages that it will recognize on, with a minimum somewhere around 7.5v. If your battery is anything resembling “pretty dead”, you’re stuck buying new overpriced batteries. Or are you? If you can get the charger to recognize the battery, it can often be revived.
A Guide for Photogaphers, Not Geeks
Most photographers have had at least one heart attack moment when they realize all of the photos they’ve taken on a shoot (or a vacation) are suddenly gone, and there’s nothing on the camera’s storage card. Perhaps you’ve accidentally formatted the wrong card, or the card just somehow got damaged. If you’re a professional photographer, there’s a good chance your’e also not a forensic scientist or a hard-core nerd (although it’s OK to be all three!). That minor detail doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t learn to carve data off of a bad storage card and save yourself a lot of money on data recovery. While there are many aspects to forensic science that are extremely complicated, data carving isn’t one of them, and I’ll even walk you through how to do it on your Mac in this article, with a little bit of open source software and a few commands. If you’re scared of your computer, don’t worry. This is all very easy even though it looks a bit intimidating at first. You can test your skills using any old storage card you might have on hand. It doesn’t have to be damaged, although you might be surprised just how much data you thought was deleted from it!
First, lets talk about how your storage card works. When you plug your storage card into your computer, your computer looks for a list of files on the card; this is kind of like a rolodex of all the files your camera has stored. This “catalog” basically says, “OK, this file is this big, and it starts here”. You can think of it like the table of contents of a book. When you format a storage card, most of the time it’s just this table of contents that gets deleted; the actual bits and bytes from the photo you took aren’t erased (because that would take too long). The same can be true when the file system becomes damaged; in most cases, it’s just the file listing that gets blown up somehow, making it appear like there are no files on the card. In more extreme cases, physical damage can sometimes damage the data from one part of the card, but the data for the other half of the card can still be recovered; your computer needs to be told to look past all the damaged data, instead of just giving you an error message.
Every “professional” photography book I’ve read makes it gospel that you have to shoot landscapes at f/22, in order to ensure that the foreground and background is in focus. Special thanks to these guys for teaching millions of photographers to create blurry photos. Lens Diffraction, and an explanation as to why shooting at f/22 (and