It’s not every day that you find $5000 worth of camera lying in the middle of the street. But that’s exactly what happened to one New York City construction worker as he took an alternative route to get lunch in Brooklyn this week.

Jay Falq decided to change up his routine a little and ended up finding a Canon EOS R5 and RF 15-35mm lens just lying in the middle of the street, with no photographer in sight. Jay is not a photographer himself and assumed that the camera was fairly expensive. At that point, however, he didn’t know quite how expensive.

Left in the street

“As I’m walking, I see this black thing in the middle of the street, and I’m talking right smack in the middle. Initially, I thought, what the heck is it?” says Jay.

“As I approach, I see the camera. It’s huge with the lens. I pick it up and look around and see nobody. Surely, this is a YouTube prank video… I’m just waiting for some kids to pop out,” he adds.

Jay waited around for a little while to see if the photographer might come back for it, but when nobody showed up, he realised it was up to him to try to find the owner. When he returned to his office he looked up the camera model online and was staggered at how expensive this gear was.

Expensive equipment

“It wasn’t until I got back to my office and I google searched the model,” says Jay, “Never in my life would I have thought the total set up was $5000! It was right then I knew I HAD to get this back to the owner.”

Jay started having a closer look at the camera to see if he could get some sort of a clue as to who the owner could be. “I open the view screen and start fumbling around with it. Truthfully, I didn’t even know what I was pressing,” Jay jokes.

He managed to access the SD card, and there were about 1500 photos, many of which looked like professional photoshoots. Indeed, the R5 is a pro-level camera and no doubt the owner was going a bit spare about having lost it.

Finding the owner

Jay took photos from the camera’s LCD display with his phone and, on a whim, decided to share them with his friends on Facebook to see if anyone knew any of the people in the photos.

“Never in a million years did I think it would go viral,” says Jay. After receiving hundreds of messages, mostly telling him to check the copyright data to see if the photographer’s name was in it, Jay finally received one message claiming to know the couple in one of the photos.

The couple shared the Instagram page of the photographer, and there on his Instagram page were the same images that Jay had on the camera. Finally, the photographer was found.

All’s well that ends well

A few hours after finding the camera, Jay was able to meet up with the photographer and return the camera.

“He seemed so shy. Maybe embarrassed,” says Jay. “He told me he was loading the car after the shoot, and it must have slipped out of the bag.”

I think I can speak for most photographers that losing my camera would be a total nightmare. The photographer must have been so grateful to get his camera back in one piece. We often hear stories of photographers being mugged for their equipment, so to leave an expensive camera in the street in New York City, of all places, and then to have it found and returned is just amazing.

One good tip from this is perhaps we should all fill in our name and contact details in the EXIF copyright info on the camera. On the off chance that we do lose our camera, it might be easier to return it from that than relying on the internet.

However, this story is proof that there really are good people around who want to do the right thing and that the internet and social media can pull everyone together. I hope that good karma comes back to Jay tenfold after this. Some heroes truly don’t wear capes!

DIYP have reached out to the photographer for comment, but so far has not heard back from him. Name withheld for privacy reasons.