101 ways to ruin a roll of film

Using my Bronica SQ for the first time in a long while recently, I re-acquainted myself with the manual. This suggested that you remove the darkslide from the filmback when you fit it to the camera, then leave it out so that the back could'nt be opened accidentally. Given there is nowhere to park the darkslide and you have to press 2 buttons at once to open the back, I happily replaced the slide after shooting a couple of frames. I'm guessing you're probably ahead of me by now, but I still haven't a clue how I managed to press both the buttons at once while the camera was on the tripod. :banghead::banghead::banghead: It was my first roll of Ektar and I'd shot either 7 or 8 frames, so I'm going to gamble on getting something off the roll. :oops: :$
 
Peter B said:
but I still haven't a clue how I managed to press both the buttons at once while the camera was on the tripod. :banghead::banghead::banghead:
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Would you like to borrow my " Blithering idiot" title for the evening? :D

I want it back by morning though, if not, folk may start to believe that I have intelligence:LOL:
 
Asha said:
Would you like to borrow my " Blithering idiot" title for the evening? :D

I want it back by morning though, if not, folk may start to believe that I have intelligence:LOL:
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That's a very generous offer Asha, but I believe it was probably caused by a leftover bad spirit from Halloween. :whistle:
 
I've contacted my adviser on all things spiritual, and I expect an exorcism/spell to be applied in due course. :angelic:
 
Peter B said:
Using my Bronica SQ for the first time in a long while recently, I re-acquainted myself with the manual. This suggested that you remove the darkslide from the filmback when you fit it to the camera, then leave it out so that the back could'nt be opened accidentally. Given there is nowhere to park the darkslide and you have to press 2 buttons at once to open the back, I happily replaced the slide after shooting a couple of frames. I'm guessing you're probably ahead of me by now, but I still haven't a clue how I managed to press both the buttons at once while the camera was on the tripod. :banghead::banghead::banghead: It was my first roll of Ektar and I'd shot either 7 or 8 frames, so I'm going to gamble on getting something off the roll. :oops: :$
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You think your camera would have a safety device that you can't press the shutter with the dark slide in...... IIRC the RB67 has this.
 
excalibur2 said:
You think your camera would have a safety device that you can't press the shutter with the dark slide in...... IIRC the RB67 has this.
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It has indeed got that feature Brian, but I tend to use it the same way as LF and have the whole shot set up before drawing out the slide just before taking the photo. The darkslide is supposed to stop you removing the back while the film is exposed, but I'm not sure that it actually stops the back from being opened with a film in it, so I'll need to go away and research that more carefully. :thinking:
 
Peter B said:
Using my Bronica SQ for the first time in a long while recently, I re-acquainted myself with the manual. This suggested that you remove the darkslide from the filmback when you fit it to the camera, then leave it out so that the back could'nt be opened accidentally. Given there is nowhere to park the darkslide and you have to press 2 buttons at once to open the back, I happily replaced the slide after shooting a couple of frames. I'm guessing you're probably ahead of me by now, but I still haven't a clue how I managed to press both the buttons at once while the camera was on the tripod. :banghead::banghead::banghead: It was my first roll of Ektar and I'd shot either 7 or 8 frames, so I'm going to gamble on getting something off the roll. :oops: :$
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I'm still not sure why it was a problem that the back came off the camera, given that the dark slide was in place, Peter?
 
ChrisR said:
I'm still not sure why it was a problem that the back came off the camera, given that the dark slide was in place, Peter?
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Apologies Chris, I've not explained it properly. The filmback is hinged at the bottom and has an insert that actually carries the film. It was the hinged part that opened and allowed the film insert to drop out. It's easier to see on Youtube at about 3.35 on the video.
 
Peter B said:
I managed to press both the buttons at once while the camera was on the tripod.
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I have actually managed to open the film back on my bronny etrs 645 whilst meaning to simply remove the back to exchange it with another.

To remove the back simply involves depressing a small button on the side of the camera body and like the sq, to open the film back requires to buttons to be pressed on the back to open it, I too am wondering how I managed it.:thinking:
It's some time ago but iirc the film was fine as the hinged door only cracked open and was immediatley closed again so there is a fair chance that you too will have most if not all your images;)
 
Asha said:
I have actually managed to open the film back on my bronny etrs 645 whilst meaning to simply remove the back to exchange it with another.

To remove the back simply involves depressing a small button on the side of the camera body and like the sq, to open the film back requires to buttons to be pressed on the back to open it, I too am wondering how I managed it.:thinking:
It's some time ago but iirc the film was fine as the hinged door only cracked open and was immediatley closed again so there is a fair chance that you too will have most if not all your images;)
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Thanks Asha, but mine did more than just crack open, and it was bright and sunny. :eek: I'm hopeful that maybe the first few shots will survive, and I ran through the rest of the film by repeating the shot it was set up for, so that should indicate if any of the later frames survived as well. A couple of frames left on the replacement film, so I'll get them off to Filmdev in the next couple of days, or maybe Monday.
 
You know how you are supposed to 'exercise' these lovely film cameras by firing off the shutter at different shutter speeds on fairly regular occasions....................................sometimes I hate my F3; the film advance is just so smooth I didn't even notice there was film loaded in the camera until it wouldn't advance anymore!

(Should have notice the rewind crank spinning but I didn't just like I didn't notice it not spinning when the film wasn't loaded correctly! These 'senior' moments are happening much more often these days!)
 
Peter B said:
What is this world, if full of care
We have no time to stop and say ...... what was I going to do there? :rolleyes:
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I've just about got to the stage in life now where if I drop something and bend down to pick it up I look round to see if there's anything else that needs doing while I'm down there, to make it worth the effort! :D
 
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Bend down.....................that went years ago - I squat then look for something to pull myself upright again - low vantage points with the camera are a distant memory!
 
FishyFish said:
I just opened the back of the camera with which I shot 21 frames of Portra 160 today. :facepalm:
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I just got the scans back from Filmdev and, somewhat to my amazement, only four of them show any sign of light leakage (a couple of which I quite like the effect on too!). I only got 35 frames back and I usually tend to get at least 37 from a roll of 135, so it's probablble that a couple of others were completely ruined and Filmdev didn't even attempt to scan them - I guess I'll see when the negs come back - but on the whole I think I dodged a bullet with these. :)
 
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FishyFish said:
I just got the scans back from Filmdev and, somewhat to my amazement, only four of them show any sign of light leakage (a couple of which I quite like the effect on too!). I only got 35 frames back and I usually tend to get at least 37 from a roll of 135, so it's probablble that a couple of others were completely ruined and Filmdev didn't even attemp to scan them - I guess I'll see when the negs come back - but on the whole I think I dodged a bullet with these. :)
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See, told you it might not be as bad as you thought. :)
 
Ollie B said:
Finding a roll of film I intended to develop 52 years ago but 'forgot' about it. There's still hope :p
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If it hasn't been sat in an oven and presumably it's a standard b&w neg film there I reckon the images will be just fine …..If there's difficulty now in obtaining the "what would have been" suitable chems for the developing, just soup it in 1:100 solution of whatever develop you fancy for an hour. ( ie stand developing)
 
Not sure about "just fine", Asha. I've read that the latent image does degrade over time. But there's a reasonable chance of getting something anyway!
 
I'm not sure about ruining a whole roll of film but I've found a good way to waste half a roll.

As I've always developed my own B&W, I have sometimes put a roll of 36 into my bulk loader's pay-off side and taped the squared off leader to an old Ilford cassette's spool. I've then wound on about an 18 frame length, thereby making a couple of short rolls. I could always tell when I reached the end of the made roll with a manual wind camera as the lever got a bit tight and I stopped.

I was feeling quite pleased with myself recently, having made a working T90 out of two non-functioning models and put a made up roll in an Ilford cassette into the T90. When it got to about 17 frames, the auto wind on single shot, ripped the film of the spool. I had an inkling that it had done so, after it made a bit of a hiccup noise. By the time the frame counter reached about 25, I knew for certain that my guess was correct.

Thinking about it with my engineering hat on, taping round the spool and sticking to both sides of the film is useless, as the the tape to the emulsion side is never going to sit in a straight line when it's put under load. I think that first putting a turn of tape round the spool in the direction of the the film wind, then fixing the tape to rear side of the film is going to be the most secure method of fixing the film to the spool.
 
NickT said:
I think that first putting a turn of tape round the spool in the direction of the the film wind, then fixing the tape to rear side of the film is going to be the most secure method of fixing the film to the spool.
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With second thoughts, this is not a good idea, in fact it is a very very bad idea, really damn stupid in truth. Any reloaded cassette with the film taped to the spool won't have a DX label and is likely to be a b*****d length of less than 36 frames. The camera will have no idea of the length and will keep auto advancing until the motor comes under excess load, which it never will. The camera will wind off all the film, then unwind the tape, sticky side down across the shutter blades on to the take up spool. I think I'm lucky that I haven't wrecked the camera. I will never use a reloaded cassette in the T90 again.

It seems my post has been bowdlerised. The robot censor thing is obviously not familiar with engineering terms for non-standard. I wonder what it will make of this link : https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nicholson-10-Half-b*****d-File/dp/B0021LNIUK
 
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Snip:
NickT said:
The camera will wind off all the film, then unwind the tape, sticky side down across the shutter blades on to the take up spool. I think I'm lucky that I haven't wrecked the camera. I will never use a reloaded cassette in the T90 again.
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From what I remember of the T90, it was more than capable of making its own shutter sticky without any help from you! ;) A possible way round this would be to stop one shot short of the end of your 'custom' roll and use the mid roll rewind button to rewind it before it reaches the physical end of the roll (if it was fitted with a rewind button - I can't remember and I used to own two T90s before I jumped to auto-focus SLRs!)?

However, that would rely entirely on your memory to work, plus you'd lose a shot at the end of each roll, so perhaps best just to feed it standard film rather than roll-ups?
 
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I left a few rolls of PanF I shot in Berlin earlier this year in my room over the summer and developed them yesterday. Turns out that PanF is really sensitive to storage conditions, the film has degraded and has looks mottled across the frame, to the extent that pictures of people look like they have a disfiguring skin affliction...

Note to self, put the film in the fridge when it gets warm!
 
Went for a woodland walk up a stunning gorge yesterday (not Cheddar Gorge, but not far away) and took the Hasselblad with me. Got 6 or 7 photos into the roll and then checked how many shots I had left, only for it to tell me that I'd taken two photos... Oh dear.

Checked it after each image from then on and it seemed to work perfectly. Given that the 500cm doesn't have a double exposure function for me to accidentally use, I am thinking that I must not have loaded the film correctly. And thinking about it now, I can't remember winding on to the first frame after loading, so I think I've just basically exposed the backing paper to light, instead of the film...

Doh!
 
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Hopefully you’ve only lost some shots, possibly some of the best shots you’ve ever taken but at least you haven’t ruined a whole roll of film.
 
Developed a roll of 35mm last night, I've not been doing this for long but so far I've been very careful with my negatives making sure to keep them clean and have never dropped them.

Last night I dropped the strip twice while trying to hang it to dry, twice while taking it down, once while cutting it and then proceeded to drop some of the cut strips while putting them into the sleeve.

I hadn't even had a drink! It's not ruined but it's very mucky!
 
Craigus said:
Developed a roll of 35mm last night, I've not been doing this for long but so far I've been very careful with my negatives making sure to keep them clean and have never dropped them.

Last night I dropped the strip twice while trying to hang it to dry, twice while taking it down, once while cutting it and then proceeded to drop some of the cut strips while putting them into the sleeve.

I hadn't even had a drink! It's not ruined but it's very mucky!
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I was about to press "Like" but realised that's entirely inappropriate. The button I want is the one marked "Gulp! Heartfelt sympathies, I've done something a bit like that but not quite so bad!".

Worth another wash before scanning?
 
Another way of ruining a roll of film is let me take pictures with it.
My digital keeper rate is about 2 out of 300. So by that, I would ruin 4.166 rolls of 36 to get one shot.
 
Well another way to ruin a roll of film is to take crappy shots that go in the bin.
I must have been drunk on west country cider taking this shot and only keep it as an example on how not to take a shot,
etrs 75mm lens
9PXs1vO.jpg
 
We've all been there Brian. So many times I've seen a great shot only to realise that it is actually a big old mess, badly composed with no focal point and not worth wasting film on, sometimes a whole roll of them. :(
 
I'll offer an alternative view. Photographs are often (usually?) not size-neutral with regards to how well they appear in print. Some are best seen in a small print, some in a large. I have one photograph that looks better at A2/20x16 than it does at A3/12x16. In this instance, I'd suggest that the myriad of detail that creates a "confused mess" when viewed at the scale we're seeing on a monitor may well be a very satisfying large print, with lots of fine detail to explore. This is easier to achieve when using larger formats.
 
StephenM said:
I'll offer an alternative view. Photographs are often (usually?) not size-neutral with regards to how well they appear in print. Some are best seen in a small print, some in a large. I have one photograph that looks better at A2/20x16 than it does at A3/12x16. In this instance, I'd suggest that the myriad of detail that creates a "confused mess" when viewed at the scale we're seeing on a monitor may well be a very satisfying large print, with lots of fine detail to explore. This is easier to achieve when using larger formats.
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Good point Stephen...but I only got half the boat, the only thing I can think of was : - I didn't have a WA lens and really should have known it was going to be a crappy shot and should never have taken it.
 
Maybe you have the other half some where and all you need to do is stitch them together.
 
I know this isn't a thread for comments/suggestions, so I won't expand on my reasons; but try cropping the top to a little below the "crows' nests" and see what you think.

I'm more likely to spend an age setting up my camera on a tripod and then walking away without an exposure than I am to make one. I'll never know how many "keepers" I failed to make, but that's the way I work. Except when I have a digital camera; then I may make as many as 100 exposures in a day (although usually more like 10).
 
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