Stupid things you did

Mmmm, let me see :

-No film in the camera. Happened to me once, first time using a Canon AE-1. Still got that "sure you got film in it?" from my (many unfortunately ) friends present on that day. Running gag...

-Opening my M6 base plate to load film in it, only to find out there's already a roll in it... Same spirit : finishing a roll, forgetting to rewind the film THEN opening the base plate to take it off. Love my Hexar RF 's little window and auto rewind for this!

-Photographing with the lens cap on. Almost one out of every roll with my Hexar RF because AE makes me think I have a P&S.

-Filters on with color film in the camera.

-I do a lot of mid-roll swaping (bw vs. color, iso change, ... etc). Guess what? Some double exposure happened! That way, you kill 2 "birds" with one "stone"... That was painful as it involved precious shots of my new born daughter :bang: I dread the day she comes to me and asks "why are there so few early pictures of me?" 🙂

What can I say, I prefer to focus on what I see than on my gear when I'm shooting! Won't change that. I learned damage control and double checking along the way though...

Benjamin.


On the other hand, never screwed up in the darkroom. 😎... Yet! 😛 And I know why: no distractions.
 
Shot the first polaroid of the cub scouts ...... in my converted 900 with the 4X5 back, all black ..... Oh, this one does have a dark slide!

Dave
 
One complete roll of 135-36 double-exposed because I had forgot to mark the film as I usual do as "exposed" and just thrown it back into the bag after the first exposure...😱

Two times removed the base plate without having the film rewound ... :bang::bang:
 
Iceseven said:
It happened two or three times that after taking more than the 36 exposures I could do with my film, I wondered why I can still take pictures. After trying to rewind the film, it took only two or three windings and the film was all the way rolled back. I put the film in the camera, but it didn't have sufficient contact with the spool, so the winder wouldn't pull the film at all. Bummer.
Click to expand...

Happened to my in beautiful Copenhaven. I only realized when I was home again.

Lens cap on? Yes, just some months ago when I went to St. Petersburg with my dad. He had a laugh!

No Film? No CF card? No, has not happened to me so far.

But I have dropped my EOS 350D. Luckily, it survived.

A very bad thing that happened to my once was when I got a lens for testing and did not have the time to do so. I had to send back the lens without having used it. 🙁

Another time I bought a beautiful Yashica-24 on a camera fair, only to realize - the next day - that the light meter was out of order and the shutter jammed. Gangsters!
 
I was on a jetty at Lake Issikul in Kyrgyzstan.

I had my camera to my eye and was walking backwards down the jetty and stepped into a hole about the size of a dinner plate. Fortunately I only had some bad scratches and a hole in my jeans, but to this day I am thankful that I didn't break my leg or rip a large gash in it. I was very very lucky, and would not have wanted to go to the local hospital.

I took a photo of that hole, and have been meaning to scan in some of those photos, I'll post them sometime. 🙂

It was around here somewhere...
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&sou...34969,77.11647&spn=0.284907,0.617294&t=h&z=11
 
when a few month ago after many years I start again to develop myself B&W I decided (based on tech desription) for a develop time of 12 min at 24 °C. Home average temperature was 20 °C so I spent one evening to evaluate if temperature was dropping quick or not. I made tables and graphic. Satisfied next evening I made all the process, but at the end I had the feeling the water was a little too warm so I took a different termometer and verified that the one I use was wrong giving at least 5°C of difference! All my graphic have been useless! But the film was not so bad at the end...
 
Had a couple days to kill in Oahu, decided to drive up to the North Shore for the day. While driving the radio was reporting the surf was TOO large and a world surfing event was on hold -- intermittently being opened and closed depending upon the current conditions. I drove on with enthusiasm, thinking this had to be seen, and the event was finally declared open with 30 to 40 foot waves (true measurement, not the "California" method. Faces of the waves were actually 60 to 80 feet high). The crowd was huge and I couldn't get close at all. I had a little 90 or 105mm Pentax IQ Zoom with me and nothing else 😡. All the right gear for this situation was sitting at home in Idaho.

Went back the following year with two large tripods, 600mm and 1200mm lenses, and a third camera for crowd shots (in addition to the underwater gear that I always take). Sent all this crap in Pelican cases by FedEx beforehand. Drove up to Sunset Beach around 7:00 a.m., to be sure of getting a really good spot. Set up and waited... the surf was as flat as a pond all day. Around 1:00 a Lifeguard came by and asked "What in the hell are you doing?" I simply did not have an answer except to say "I really don't know..." 😀

That was the very last time I ever traveled with that much camera gear. Now I take a tiny P&S digital, a RF or two and a couple of lenses (small lenses) -- everything fits in a very small bag with room to spare.
 
Flew to Atlanta from across the seas, all nervous about missing a connecting flight home and I had to pickup my brother in New Jersey the following day.
Went through the passport and luggage control when I realized that my little bag with M7 with 35lux ASPH on it and a few rolls of film weren't with me.

Literally droped everything, ran to the first security person I saw and told them my valuable bag was still on the plane. He was nice enough to get me back up to the arrival floor of the terminal. I was running the whole time (had a connecting flight to catch). There at the gate I begged 2 other security people to check the plane for me and had to wait painful 5-10 minuted, that felt like an hour, for the cleaning crew to finish with the plane.

One of the security people got on the plane and came back with my little bag that was sitting under the seat in front of me. It was one of the happiest moments related to photography that I had, especially since I had plans to meet my brother in New Jersey to go on a street-shooting vacation in Boston, NYC and Washington DC for a week.

Of course I missed the connecting flight, had to get a rental car (that I had to return to Atlanta when I was done since one way cars weren't available in the whole dam... airport), drive 4 hours to Alabama to pick up my wife, drive straight to New Jersey (about 16 hours) to pickup my brother from the airport there, then drive 3-4 more hours to Boston where we had a hotel reservation.

By that time I was completely waisted, especially since I had a 10-hour flight before doing the driving. My wife drove some, but I was still waisted.

Happy ending!
 
robert blu said:
when a few month ago after many years I start again to develop myself B&W I decided (based on tech desription) for a develop time of 12 min at 24 °C. Home average temperature was 20 °C so I spent one evening to evaluate if temperature was dropping quick or not. I made tables and graphic. Satisfied next evening I made all the process, but at the end I had the feeling the water was a little too warm so I took a different termometer and verified that the one I use was wrong giving at least 5°C of difference! All my graphic have been useless! But the film was not so bad at the end...
Click to expand...

Never compare thermometers; it is the way of madness. Test and process with the same thermometer only. Or better yet, sell one.
 
Forgetting to press the rewind button on my Trip 35 once before winding the film; wondered why it was so stiff, only to open the back and find the film ripped at the sprockets and completely un-rewound.
 
The usual - opening back with film in - shooting velvia with the yellow filter still on the front. Dropping a film canister and the end falling off 😱

Dropped a Ifra-Red converted EOS20d onto the tarmac outside Horseguards Parade Ground in London (After safely sending it 15,000km to and from Seattle for conversion) - it survived.

Lost a Jupiter 8 on the Giants Causeway - changing lenses on a Zorki 4 it slipped fell and bounced and was gone.... (Finn Macool is now FSU RF convert 😉 )

I was with a friend a few years back when he left a Nikon 5700 digital camera on a train seat near Croydon (He'd just bought it the week before for £1200! - He was sick as a parrot!)
 
Leaving a light meter and a Canonet on the car roof and driving away. (separate occasions, years apart)

Also, back in the eighties, I bought a used Leica M4-2with 50 Summicron. I wasn't ready for a non-metered Leica at that time, so I traded it in for a new Nikon 801s with 35mmf2 lens. Even. :bang:
 
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What, no darkroom mishaps? OK, here's one from a home dev newbie: Not having a proper darkroom, or even dark room, I load my tank sitting in the bedroom closet after dark. Mix half a bag of D-76 with digital scales and graduates and all. Pay attention to water temp. Manage to use the right amounts of chemicals in the right order. Negatives come out looking good.

When the strip is dry, I realize it's full of embedded dust. Clothes dust. From the closet.
 
Wow, it is very therapeutic to here all these stories. When it happens to me, I always feel that I'm the only person stupid enough to have make whatever mistake it is I made....

This past summer on a hot July day I was shooting some candid portraits of my two young children out on my mother-in-law's screened in porch. I was using my Mamiya M645. The light was great and it was that rare moment where the kids were happy, cooperative and looking at the camera. I remember shooting a handful of frames and getting really excited about how great I thought the shots were turning out. I even got two closeups of my son hugging my daughter, they were smiling, and so on.

After I shot the last frame I wound on to the end of the roll, opened the camera back and pulled out the insert (if you have a M645 you'll know what I'm talking about). I carefully pulled the exposed roll out of the insert and just as I started turning it in my hands to fold over the end of the paper I dropped it right on the porch floor!

I remember my heart sinking as I saw it unraveling. Even now it still depresses me. Funny thing is, I've handled numerous rolls of 120 film - including in extremely cold weather where my fingers were totally numb - and never had a problem.
 
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Just today, brought everything to shoot LF .....

Just today, brought everything to shoot LF .....

.....tripod, dark cloth, film, meter, camera....

Everything except the film holder.

Doh.....

Vick
 
Beer in the Darkroom

Beer in the Darkroom

A darkroom incident:
Tempting to get more artistic, I entered to my darkroom after having a few beers, with another bottle in my hand.
While trying to pass a print to the washing bath, I stumbled on something and flipped the fixer tray all over.
The table, the floor, the walls, my clothes and shoes were all soaked with the smelly stuff.
Having trouble focusing at this event, I took another sip of my beer, turned off everything and went for a bath, leaving behind me all the mess.

The morning after, my wife asked me what was all the noise in the middle of the night and why the area of the darkroom smells funnier than usual.
I told her I was experimenting new printing techniques :angel:

Three days later I gathered the mental strength to get into the room again for cleaning it up.

Since them, I never drink more than one beer while printing.
 
Well I have done alot of these samall things like lenscap on, film not thread well enough and stuff like that. Not so long ago I turned my papper upside down in the darkroom and almost poured down the developer cause I thought it was done 🙄

But the biggest one I´ve made was in my early days when I was shooting some landscapes in a cold weather. After a long walk to my car I put my camera on the rofftop of my car while opening the car and taking of my jacket. Then getting in the car and drive off. Luckely I looked in the rearviewmirror and saw something bouncing on the ground. It was my camera :bang: Nothing broke though and I used that camera for some years after that. It was a Canon EOS 5.
 
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