Some people are born idiots. Some have idiocy thrust upon them while others work to become idiots. As a teacher I've seen samples of all three. Jerome is one of those who works at it. I had, reluctantly, let him use one of the school cameras for his media studies assignment. All he had to do was point and shoot. Hopefully even he couldn't stuff that up.
Turns out he could. He took a series of photos. He only needed to hand in the ten best. I even told him that I'd download them. So after he finished his shooting he scrolled through all his shots, tagging the ten best. Then he deleted everything else.
Unfortunately, not so. Deleting tends to delete the photos you've tagged. Not the ones you haven't selected. I saw his face fall, knew something had gone wrong and grabbed the camera off him before he tried to fix it. Once he explained the problem I told him I'd do a recovery on the SD card and pull off his photos for him. Fat chance I was going to let him try to do it.
I had some spare time at lunch and so I slipped the card into my PC and ran the recovery. Several hundred pictures came down. I sorted them by date and there were Jerome's lost pictures. Quite good, some of them. He had an eye for what makes a good picture. I dropped the photos he wanted into his email, so all he had to do was polish them up and print them. I also dumped all his work into a folder as a backup for when he lost them again.
With my good deed done I was about to get rid of everything that had come down of the card, but decided to scroll through it seeing what was there. Geez. What a load of dreck had been on that card. I was tempted to just scrub the lot and forget about it when an excellent picture of a nude came up.
This I considered interesting for several reasons. One, we don't encourage our students to do nude photography. Two, if anyone had handed in that particular item as part of an assignment there was no way I would have forgotten it. Three, I recognised the young lady displaying her charms.
I continued looking through the recovered photos. Well, wouldn't you? There was a good dozen of them, all quite excellent shots. I was wondering who had been the lucky lad who got to take the photos when I spotted a reflection in one of the photos. There was no-one behind the camera. They were all timed shots. The best selfies I'd seen in a long time.
Apart from that burst, there was nothing else worth looking at in the recovered shots so I wiped the file. (After I saved those photos, of course.) Then I reformatted the card, completely wiping them so no-one else would accidentally recover them.
After school was finished I stayed behind. While all the nudes had been good photos, a couple of them had been excellent. With a little skill in Photoshop I thought I could upgrade those two from excellent to superb. I'd just put the finishing touches on the second of the photos and saved it when young Heidi came in.
Heidi is a student-teacher undergoing training at our school. She has hair that is so dark it's almost black, with large hazel eyes in a heart-shaped face. A superb figure and a demure manner, and most of the male sex at the school lusted after her. Any who didn't were probably gay.
"Sorry I'm late, sir," she said. "I was held up answering questions after my last class."
"Not a problem," I assured her. "I just need to get some information off you."
On my screen, where she could actually see it, was the second of the touched up pictures, and it really was good. Playboy would have snapped it up with no questions asked.
"I just wanted to know," I said, tapping the screen, "if you used more than one camera when you were taking these pictures."
She naturally walked around the desk to see what pictures I was referring to, and when she spotted it she just froze, mouth hanging open, face bright red. I don't know why she was embarrassed. It was a first class picture and she had a first class figure. I'll admit it showed everything she had but if you've got it, flaunt it, and that picture certainly did.
"The reason I ask," I said innocently, "is because I don't want to have to go around and do recovery on all our SD cards prior to reformatting them. You do understand I'll have to reformat any card with this sort of picture on it. Rules about showing the students nudity and all that."
"H-how did you get that?" she managed to ask.
"Jerome," I told her. "He screwed up and I had to recover his work. These were with it. Did you really have Jerome taking your picture? This one is really superb."
"No," she shrieked. "No way. No-one took the pictures."
"Excuse me?" I said, indicating the picture on the screen.
"What I mean is I took the photos using the timing option. No-one else has even seen them. I thought I'd deleted them all."
"You probably did, but you didn't reformat the card. When I did Jerome's recovery, voila!" I indicated the screen again. "Cameras?" I added.
"Just the one," Heidi said with a gulp. "Can you please delete that picture."
"You have to be kidding. I'm thinking of printing it poster size and framing it. It will be a terrific picture. You realise you could win competitions with a picture like this?"
"You're joking. I'd die if that picture got out."
"Now that puzzles me. After all, it was you who took the picture in the first place. And it is artistic, not really pornographic. Just an excellent shot of a superb female form."
"I was just curious as to what I'd look like in a nude photo," Heidi said, sounding miserable. "I was here alone and the camera was set up and, well, I just took some to see what they looked like. I deleted them as soon as I'd seen them."
"Deleting them was an act of artistic vandalism," I told her. "You should have printed then and saved them as a personal portfolio."
"Well, I don't want them. Will you please delete them."
"If you insist, but the only way to be certain they're gone is to do it yourself. Be my guest."
I pushed myself back from the PC and waved her towards it. Heidi gave me a suspicious look and then quickly deleted the photos. She's not an idiot. As soon as they were deleted she emptied the wastebasket. Not happy with that she jumped over to disk management and set a defrag running on my disk. Those photos were gone.
"Where's the SD card?" she asked.
