"Hi Rowan. Small world. The guy on the far right is John Wesley-Smith", a reader called Tarik messaged.
Mr Wesley-Smith, a manager at Telecom, was stunned when NZPA rang him to tell him his camera had been found.
"I didn't know where and how I lost it. I wasn't expecting to get it back," he said.
He said he had been driving home from holiday when the camera disappeared.
It was "great" his snaps had been saved, he said.
He said he would contact Mr Simpson to arrange to get his camera back.
Mr Simpson said on his website he had wanted to test the claim that everyone in New Zealand was connected to everyone else by fewer than six degrees of separation.
- NZPA