A little while ago, someone who knows we are both interested in photography gave us a camera that had been in a lost property box for a while and asked if we could find it’s owners. I wasn’t present when the actual exchange took place, but it ended up at our house and sat on a shelf until the other day when things were explained to me.

So, this is what we were given.

It’s a Sony TX-5. The battery was totally dead when I started looking at it, but we have, by chance, a Sony charger that fitted the battery and so have been able to charge it.

The SD card was 8Gb and contained a lot of pictures, starting in Dec 30th 2010 – was it a christmas present?

There is no name given for copyright in the EXIF data, so I started looking at the pictures to try and find the owner.

I found a car with a legible number plate, but as it looked like a holiday this was probably a rental car.

Discovering that there was a wedding and I could identify the venue, I started to get my hopes up. the venue is still going, had a web page and so I sent an email with some details in the hope they could help. Sadly they couldn’t as the venue has changed hands and no records are available for the date.

Next stop was to look at the recurring pictures of a street. I assume it’s where the owner lives and by looking at street signs and using Google I’ve been able to narrow down the house the pictures were taken from to 2 houses. As the house is in Orgeon and I have no way of getting more information, I sent an email to the local police department – who replied and are looking into what they can do!

Sat, 27th Sept 2014

The property that I identified was in Medford, OR – which is a long way from Scotland! As I wasn’t able to follow up myself I sent an email to the Medford Police Dept hoping that they may be able to assist. The enquiry was passed to Gena Criswell who responded in the best way possible – by offering to help! After a few emails and a few additional pictures being supplied she was able to contact someone from the pictures who confirmed the camera belonged to her brother! Yes, after all this time it’s owner has been identified.

I’m waiting for her brother to get in touch and will then arrange to send the camera to him.

I still can’t really believe that this has had such a good outcome, but a large portion of that is down to the amazing efforts of Gena and the Medford Police Department.

Mon, 6th October 2014

Since hearing from the Medford police, the owner has been in touch and supplied the address for returning the camera. I had intended to send it last week, but events overtook me and so today I am packaging up the camera to send back to it’s owner.

The outcome couldn’t have been any better.