Wedding Photographer Falls Into Lake With Camera Containing Couple’s Images

A wedding photographer thought he had lost a couple’s images when he fell into a lake with his camera during their shoot. But divers managed to salvage the photos.

According to a report by 12 News, Ghurrinder Singh and Valeria Perez went to Tempe Town Lake in Tempe, Arizona, with their wedding photographer Anil Kanwar for a final set of photos after their ceremony.

Tempe Town Lake is Arizona’s second-most visited public attraction and the reservoir has become a popular backdrop for photo shoots.

However, during the shoot, Kanwar accidentally fell into the Tempe Town Lake, taking his camera and all their wedding photos down with him underwater.

12 News reports that Kanwar was devastated for Singh and Perez and distraught that their priceless wedding photos were lost in the lake.

“I wasn’t worried about the camera. But I was worried about the madness,” Kanwar tells 12 News.

According to Singh and Perez, Kanwar immediately offered to jump back into the lake and retrieve the camera from the water. But the couple didn’t want to endanger the photographer.

“He [the photographer] was saying ‘Oh I can jump now, I can jump now, and get it out because it’s not that deep.’ But we didn’t want to take a risk or anything,” Singh recalls.

In a last-ditch effort to recover the images, Kanwar decided to message the Tempe Fire Department on Instagram and ask for help retrieving the camera from the lake.

Although the Tempe Fire Department typically does not respond to lost item calls at the lake, their dive team had a training session scheduled in the days after Singh’s and Perez’s wedding.

So the Tempe Fire Department, who understood how valuable the wedding photos would be to the couple, decided to move it to the location where the camera had fallen.

“We kind of just adjusted it and moved it over to the location of where the camera went missing,” Tiffany, an engineer paramedic at the Tempe Fire Department, tells 12 News.

“Everybody on the dive team just happened to be married, so we understood the importance of the wedding pictures as well.

Three divers from the Tempe Fire Department embarked on a search for the photographer’s camera in the lake, which at this point had been submerged for several days. Each diver spent about 20 minutes underwater and the third diver managed to find the camera in the last few minutes of his search.

While the camera was damaged beyond repair, the Tempe Fire Department’s IT team was able to dry and test the memory card.

Incredibly, the team managed to successfully recover all of the couple’s photos from the card — something that the thankful bride described as “the best wedding present we could get.”

12 News also reports that the wedding photographer’s camera, valued at $5,000, was also replaced through insurance.