Family photos fished from lake, sent back to Winnipeg

A Winnipeg actress has recovered hundreds of lost family photos after her camera was fished out of a lake in northern Ontario.

Sharon Bajer's 317 photographs were found in a digital camera that had spent six years on the bottom of Harmon Lake, located 185 kilometres north of Thunder Bay.

Last week, a group of fishermen reeled in the camera. While the camera was destroyed, the SD memory card remained intact, and the group carried it home.

"So when they came home, my husband said, 'We have a favour to ask of you.' And then he told me the story," Pat Bien told CBC. She and her husband, Kerry, are from southern Minnesota. 

Bien pulled up the memory card's photos on her computer and started searching for clues in the images that might tell her who the owner of the camera was. 

There were a number of golfing videos, some pictures of Camp Stephens, and lots of baby pictures — all with the date stamp reading 2009. 

"They're great pictures and you know, someone lost some wonderful memories," Bien said. 

'There's no way'

Bien then posted three of the photos from the card to Facebook. The post received 864 shares, and one of those shares made it to Bajer, who is an actress, playwright and director.

"My immediate reaction was, 'There's no way. I didn't lose a camera,'" Bajer recalled saying after she received a message from a friend who recognized her face in one of the photographs.

In that photo, she was posing with her husband and their son, who was then six months old.

The other two photographs were of a movie trailer and two middle-aged men, whom Bajer recognized as actor Ben Elton and Broadway composer Andrew Lloyd Webber.

"Turns out my husband had shot a movie with Andrew Lloyd Webber in Winnipeg," she said.

Lloyd Webber and Elton were in the city in the spring of 2009 for the Manitoba Theatre Centre's production of The Boys in the Photograph.

"I thought there's no other explanation — these are our pictures," she said.

Bajer is still putting the pieces together, but she believes the missing link is a six-week canoe trip that summer. Her older daughter was a regular at Camp Stephens and might have taken the camera on the trip, she said.

So far, Bajer has only seen the three of the 317 photos retrieved from the lake. She believes the others will hold some precious memories of her son's first year of life and a summer spent with friends and family in 2009.