Photographer Restores Wedding Album For Couple Who Lost Everything In California's Camp Fire
A photographer brought a bit of the past back to a couple who lost everything in the Camp Fire that devastated Paradise, California last November.
Like hundreds of residents in the small northern California town, Marc and Mary Taylor were for forced to run for their lives as the wildfire spread rapidly and gridlocked traffic made escaping by car almost impossible.
The Taylors — who have relocated to Grass Valley, a town 70 miles from Paradise — lost all of their photos in the blaze, including the album from their 1999 wedding.
Mary Taylor told KCRA-TV that she located one of the photographers who worked at the wedding, and asked if there was a chance they had copies of the photos.
"They came back to me and said, 'We dug immediately, and we found them. We have them.' And I told Marc, I said, 'Oh my God, they have them.' And so we both started crying," Mary told the tv station.
Mary told Marc that the photographer, Richard Briggs, had the negatives and said he would reprint the album.
"We were just like, 'That just doesn't happen,'" Marc said.
Briggs told KCRA that he has kept an archive of every photo he's taken since 1985, and though he and the Taylors hadn't seen one another in 20 years, he remembered them and their wedding.
"I remember him crying as she was walking down the aisle, and I thought, 'These people are so much in love,'" he told the tv station.

Briggs said the negatives were a bit faded, but that he purchased a scanner and his wife used photo editing software to bring "color and life" back into the photos.