Topic: Lost/ruined film

[Chris.W]

Hi everyone.  Just been waiting for my camera to warm up to room temperature before unloading the film I shot today.  I was really excited 'cos I had a close encounter with two inquisitive swans in the lovely afternoon light, plus a 1 hour long night exposure from a while back I was looking forward to seeing.  Unfortunately when I opened up the camera back I noticed that the film was the wrong way round!!!  Im perplexed at how It happened and I really can't believe it... I'm gutted.  It's the same feeling I got when I lost a film last year which I knew had some cracking images on it. 

Has anyone else had any embarrassing moments like this or lost a film with shots they knew were really going to be awesome? 

It is hard to express how attached I get to those little rectangles in paper rolls.  On the plus side:  I found and processed a five-year-old(ish) film from an olympus trip I haven't used in, oh.. around five years.





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[sapata]

It hapenned once to me as well...  I was a t the college and had never used roll film before so I shot the entire film with the paper facing the lens...

[Skorj]

I shoot expired Polaroid; every shoot involves some sort of 'incident'. Meter error, dark-slide in, pod-CATO, setting error. Once, we drove four hours into the wilderness, to a special place on a hill, took ten test shots of passing trains, waited two hours for our target train (called the 'Moomin'), metered 100 times, then as the train approached changed my shooting angle, did not re-meter, and missed the shot.

Lucky one of the test shots was have usable, just pity it wasn't the right train!



See ya! Skj.

[LT]

I've done the usual 'forgot to change the film speed on spotmeter whilst making unmissable shots in a once in a lifetime location'' mistake, but my all time catastrophically stupid  mistake was after a week of shooting in Orkney. Upon returning home, I loaded up several reels of 120 and put in a daylight  dev tank. Once the developer time was up, instead of taking off the lid, I unscrewed the whole top. What was I thinking? 6 films completely fogged. That was about 7 years ago. I'm still saving to go back & reshoot.   

[Francois]

I don't know why the worse always happens on vacation?
My dad once shot an entire film with an empty camera... he said he thought Kodak had really improved their cassettes, "they wind so easy it's like if there was nothing in the camera"... truth be told, there wasn't.

As for my worse mistake, I learned to always use the "English" instructions when mixing D-76... the French version has been translated in metric to make things easy... calculating volumes to make 3785 ml instead of 128 Fl.Oz is mind numbing...

I ended up with a weak solution and a bunch of very thin negatives...

[moominsean]

i've lost plenty of film. i japan i lost 3-4 rolls in my rolleiflex because it wasn't sensing the film and it advanced too far. i've had the backs fall off my cameras. i've had developer go bad. i've done the polaroid thing where i take a shot of something, drive away and peel 2 miles later to find that it's super under/over exposed. etc., etc.

[jessthespringer]

Shot some Agfa Scala transparency a little while ago, for an architecture project, bit of a disaster, heaps of the frames were ruined, I'm guessing it was X-Ray damage, but, not sure, this kind of thing...



Lost 3 rolls of exposed film on Croagh Patrick, a mountain in Mayo, they must have fallen out of my rucksack or something, was gutted about those, they were the first few rolls I shot though a Diana camera.

Managed to spectacularly ruin a roll of Delta 3200, very rock & roll, the film was shot on the last night of a 5 day Blues Festival, a monday night, I needed to process the film straight after the gig as I had to print the pictures the next morning.  No problem there.  Apart from the fact, the last night is always a bit of a party night.  So, anyway, I ended up processing the film in the early hours of the morning, slightly deaf and very much under the influence...  I'm still not exactly sure how it happened, but, I somehow managed to expose the film to light and ruined at least half of it, the good half!