Hi LisaDarln,

My fellow members have already given you some good links on data recovery software. Your chances of recovery are dependent on the amount of activity on your machine, and whether you have defragmented the hard drive.

If you have deleted the files using windows explorer, they would generally just go into your recycle bin, and can generally be recovered from that, using its inbuilt recovery command. This assumes that you have not emptied it.

My contribution is that you actually have TWO possibilities here:

1. Recover from the hard drive
2. Recover from the memory in your digital camera

If you have not overwritten the image in your digital camera's memory it is still there.

http://home.nexgo.de/christian_grau/dir/index.html

The product is called "Digital Image Recovery" it used to be free, but I am not sure about the latest version. You may have to do a search for a freeware site that has the older versions?

The principle is the same as for your HDD. Just connect the camera to your PC and scan its memory with this software.

If you have trouble finding it, please let me know and I will try to find out where I got it from. I think it was on a magazine CD, in which case it is probably in their website archives somewhere.

I would like to see the picture with the "orb" on it. I have been a keen photographer for 40 years and would suggest that they are more than likely "artifacts" produced by light reflections on the inner lens surfaces. This is why you get "lens hoods" for conventional cameras Remember that although your camera is "digital" its capture mechanism is still optical.

EDIT: It was a Haloween party, so the lighting would be low, with a good number of point sources (individual lightbulbs). Your camera aperture would be wide open, which explains the "orb" effect. When you take a backlit subject in daylight, the aperture is partly "stopped down" so you get a "polygon" effect.

Good luck