The camera case was split. It was rusted, leaking battery acid and full of barnacles when Josh Zuelke found it.
Zuelke, 25, was scanning the beach for seashells when he spotted the camera between the surf and sand.
A professional photographer himself, Zuelke, 25, took the find back home to Illinois, where he set to work trying to recover the files stored on the damaged camera.
"I didn't have any hope, but, I mean, I tried and I managed to get them," Zuelke told WBBH.
The 160 pictures appear to show a family on vacation July 7-8, 2012, in the Florida Keys.
Zuelke is trying to get the photos back to the family in them.
“You don’t want to lose something like that. It’s just, once you lose it, it’s gone,” Zuelke said. “I just hope that I can get these pictures back to these people, you know. I would want the same for me.”
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