Your Worst Nightmare in Photography

[desmo]

What has been your worst nightmare come true in photography?

On my first trip to China (I stayed a year), I took several bulk rolls of Velvia and Ektachrome and lots of 35mm cans. I shot about 35 rolls and took them to the Kodak Q Lab in Lanzhou where I lived to have E6 processed.

Silly me, I thought a Q Lab guaranteed results!
When I returned to collect them half were stuffed! They had 'economised on chemistry' by using it beyond expiration and the shadows were a ghastly green. The lab offered me a few rolls of film in exchange (after much arguing) but would not even consider compensating me for all the travel wasted.

Kodak never replied to an email to them.

I never went there again and saved all my shots up for trips to a lab in Beijing from then on.

 

[dostacos]

using a Pentax ME Super in Israel and not getting a whole roll shot because the "magic fingers" on the loading spool did not engage the film so I lost 36 potential great shots

the good news was I was shooting slide and print and it was the print roll that did not go through the camera.....

 

[julianphotoart]

That's easy. The recent Pacific Ocean dunking of my venerable M3, 10 day-old ZI-M 25mm lens and CV lightmeter. DAG recently fixed the camera and lens back to good-as-new; the cheapo CV lightmeter came away unscathed despite being the only item of the 3 with electronics. Go figure.

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

Oh...which one to pick? The one that was a great picture but was out of focus?

The one where the film came off the spool in my M6, so rewinding the film was, well, a lost case without a dark change bag (which I didn't have during my trip to Stillwater...ok, not a real trip, but I was an hour away from home).

Maybe the one where my Olympus fell and I heard a solid "crash".

Oh, yes: 30+ rolls back from Mexico, I had them developed --here in the US--, and every single one of them came back scratched. Oh yeah, that one's still a beauty (and I never set a foot in their lab again)...

 

[peterc]

Oooo... there's a list.
Nightmares I've actually lived:
Leaving the camera on top of the car and driving off was probably the most costly. :bang: :bang:
Exposing a roll of slow speed slide film (it was K25) at 400 ... identical bodies, different films. :bang:

Peter

 

[Frank Granovski]

My worst nightmare is taking pics and not realizing the film isn't fastened. This happened 4 or 5 times. 😎

 

[hoot]

That's easy... joining RFF. 😀

 

[desmo]

That's a real wallet buster!

That's easy. The recent Pacific Ocean dunking of my venerable M3, 10 day-old ZI-M 25mm lens and CV lightmeter. DAG recently fixed the camera and lens back to good-as-new; the cheapo CV lightmeter came away unscathed despite being the only item of the 3 with electronics. Go figure.

 

[desmo]

Fun thread, more please: what about worst photo 'urban ledgend'?

 

[RML]

Dropping my newly arrived CL on the pavement while attaching O-rings to attach my neck strap. I should have waited until I was home but I was too eager and tried while walking home....

 

[BJ Bignell]

Nothing really bad has happened yet, but:

I went on a fishing trip to the Northwest Territories, and dropped my CV21 on the wet rocks under Lady Evelyn Falls, without the rear cap in place. <I can still see it in slow motion...> It landed on its side, not on the rear element as you would imagine, and has a handsome dent in the grip ring as a souvenir!

 

[sf]

Going through the baggage check area at Waterloo station in London before getting on a Eurostar TGV to Paris. Every other place I had been allowed me to remove the film from the bag before putting it on the scanner - and to have that film hand checked. They refused my requests, tossed the film in the machine, and that was that. Then they opened all my 120 film, squeezing and pinching every single roll to make sure they were not hollow or full of C4. They even made me remove the film from my camera (on frame 1), and I am not sure how to rewind 220 out of an RF645, so I just blew the roll. They manhandled the camera, looking inside it, handling the lenses, molesting everything (while letting other passengers simply walk by with bags in hand). I was apparently their special target. Probably because a ticketing foul-up had me brought to the head of the line by the manager of customer service.

Oh, and then while in northern England, while loading film into my RF645, I dropped it in watery grit and mud at the foot of the driveway to Weather House (a childhood home on the moors southeast of Manchester). Luckily, the camera bounced off my cousin's leg and foot before hitting the ground, and I was fast enough to grab it before water began making its way into the camera. I spent a couple hours cleaning it. Looks new, now. And the CLA at Tamron certainly fixed everything. And then when I was taking pictures of that house (priceless), the camera was not spooling the film properly, and blew the roll. Of course, I didn't know this until it was too late.

Last one (years ago), my girlfriend (ex) and I were in Ellensburg, WA on the way back from taking pictures in Roslyn (where they filmed Northern Exposure). I handed her the camera for a moment while getting in the car, and she dropped it on the asphalt. Horrible sound. That was my Mamiya 645E - and it survived.

 

[aizan]

get bored with it.

 

[Evgeny S]

Going through the baggage check area at Waterloo station in London before getting on a Eurostar TGV to Paris. Every other place I had been allowed me to remove the film from the bag before putting it on the scanner - and to have that film hand checked. They refused my requests, tossed the film in the machine, and that was that. Then they opened all my 120 film, squeezing and pinching every single roll to make sure they were not hollow or full of C4. They even made me remove the film from my camera (on frame 1), and I am not sure how to rewind 220 out of an RF645, so I just blew the roll. They manhandled the camera, looking inside it, handling the lenses, molesting everything (while letting other passengers simply walk by with bags in hand). I was apparently their special target. Probably because a ticketing foul-up had me brought to the head of the line by the manager of customer service.

I was in practically the same situation, but in Heathrow airport. Bastards! 😡

My worst situation was in 1999, when I improperly put the film into the camera and lost all pictures I made during my last day of serving in the Army.

 

[amateriat]

These are tied for first place:

1) Riding my bike last Spring, entering Prospect Park, just picking up speed when a serious stoner on a wreck of a mountin bike rolls out of the bushes and into the road, not five feet in front of me. I slam into him, catapult over the bars, crash onto my left shoulder and feel my Domke bag bounce off my back and onto the pavement. Score: stoner looks on in bemusement but seems none the worse for wear; me, a pair of semi-serious lacerations on left leg, crazy-sore shoulder, a semi-tortilla'd front wheel. Opening my Domke, I pull out both my Hexars, my gut groaning at what I might find; amazingly, the only damage is a crease in the lens cap on my 50mm f/2. I send the cameras out to be checked just in case; other than the creased-cap HRF needing a minor RF alignment, no worries. My shoulder took a lot longer, but it's mostly better.

(Note: anybody have a 50mm f/2 M-Hexanon front cap they'd like to sell?)

2) A wedding shoot a few months back, mostly b/w but a few rolls of color thrown in as well. Use new lab for all the film. Very Bad Idea - I broke my own rule about never going to to a new lab cold with critical work. The B/W chromogenic rolls come out fine, but the machine decides to throw a fit in the middle of running my color, leaving highlights in the film with a scary green tint (either a bleach or fixer screw-up, I think). Delivered all the b/w, still struggling with what to do with the color rolls (the few test scans I bothered to do with them needed so much PS work, and they still bite). Client is surprisingly much cooler about the situation than I am. Lesson (re)learned.


- Barrett

 

[Kat]

Last sunday, while taking out my minolta with new seals for a spin, the film door burst open in mid-roll.😛

Can't figure out why the film rail seals are a tight fit, I'm using Jon's seals.

 

[Alec]

When son #2 was baptized, everything went wrong (short of drowning the boy, of course). The elect godfather 'forgot' his engagement and was frolicking on a Greek island on that Easter Sunday. I found a generous replacement for him the Friday before.

For me, I was 'between rangefinders', using my trusted Minolta Dynax (Maxxum) 9xi + Angénieux 2.3/28-70 zoom + big cobra flash. Before the ceremony, I took off the shade (which I never do) to prevent any... shade being projected into the pictures. And to load film, I took the strap off my shoulder (which I seldom do). Bang onto the church's stone floor. I am not very tall, but I knew something was wrong.

I picked the pieces. The flash base was broken (hello, high voltage). The lens barrel was dented and filter mount bent [hey, the only Angénieux lens ever in the Minolta AF mount - a collector's item if I ever owned one!]. The camera was nicked and its hotshoe broken. Tried to revive it but it just said something like "Err 2" (hey, DSLR talk from 1991). Big sigh. Concentrated on the ceremony. The godmother's husband takes some crappy digicam pics and DV footage, but I thank him for that.

Back at home, after lunch, I try again to examine the casualty... the body just needed to have its batteries taken out to perform a 'hard reset' (not something easily done with the grip), the flash still accepts to flash in wireless mode (with the proper crutches)... and the zoom is now a bit stiff (and probably won't ever take a filter or a shade again) but still pretty sharp... So I could have taken pictures if I had tried hard enough!!!

Lessons learned:
> never ever do without a strap
> never take off the shade
> always have a backup cam on important events (I promise, son #3 will be baptized using a RF)
> the user is the weakest link

PS : meanwhile I found a 2.8/28-70 Minolta G 'too cheap to pass' and it is an incredible lens, much better optically than the Angénieux, which found a new home with a nice HK gentleman

 

[f/stopblues]

I stacked up my first 5 rolls of HP5+ in my GS-1 and developed all at once. All were competely blank! Apparently I loaded all 5 into the camera so that the paper on the 120 film was facing the lens instead of the film.. Doh!

 

[raid]

I arrive at a wedding to take photographs for a fee, when I realized that a required connecting cord for the flash wa sleft at home.

The other unhappy incident was a big wave from the gulf (Florida) surprising me and making me fall fown, tipping the tripod with a Canon F1n and a Canon 300mm lens, plus having three lenses in a camera bag soaked with sea water.

The third incident was buying nonperforated film ... which I gave away here.

Another case that classifies here would be the time when my F1N got splashed by a wave in Maine.

I bet there are other cases.

 

[dgray]

First time I ever travelled out of the country I went to Paris on my honeymoon (17 years ago). Spent an amazing 2 weeks there - had never experienced anything like it. Between my wife and I we had a dozen rolls of film or so. We weren't photographers then, so we took them to a discount place to be developed. A week later we came back for them and half of them were missing. When we asked about them, the place responded that they had no record of any other rolls than what we turned in and there was nothing else they could do for us. My wife and I still alternate between fuming and laughing over that one.