Stupid things you did

Talking about darkroom stupidities
• I loaded a Jobo daylight tank in full sunlight without closing the top correctly and had a 36 frame roll with every single frame damaged.
• Once I developed a film in fixing bath ...
• I exposed a sheet of paper, developed it - underexposed. OK, increased exposure, developed, same issue. I repeated this three times until I noticed that I had exposed the back of the paper.
 
I have done a lot of stupid things since I began with film photography but the dumbest thing has to do with shooting with my Holgaroid.

I had just gotten it and had read all of the directions. I had never shot with instant film before, although I had watched it develop. So I shot off a few sheets, pulled them out of the camera and waited for them to develop. No pictures were forthcoming so I threw them out thinking I had underexposed the film.

It took me two days to figure out that a) the picture will not magically develop in front of me - wrong film and that b) I was throwing out the wrong part of the film. That white square was the part I was supposed to keep. :bang:

I got better at it by the way! :rolleyes:
 
heartwarming stories everybody keep them coming.....
Not a photographic incident but:

A Taiwanese flight crew was able to save their passenger jet a few minutes before impact.
A heroic feat.....but later it turned out that they had ignored the controls thinking that they were damaged (which they were not) and would have never gotten into that problem if they just had watched
 
All of the above

All of the above

Have done all of the above - most recently this summer after hiking all day found the lens cap still on. But the stupidest thing I every did was hand a 2x converter to my son while we were walking across the George Washington Bridge. He was in a funk and dropped the lens to the ground. I watched it slowly roll under the guardrail and disappear over the side. I had visions of a headline in the Daily News "Boy on Bridge Kills Boater with Camera Lens". Luckily nobody was passing under the bridge at that moment.
 
Not user error or gear misbehavior. I was on vacation in Eilat (Israel), had all the photo opportunities of Arava desert, Dead Sea and surroundings, had OM1 w/35mm lens loaded with Ilford b&w film, and got home with zero (0) images - decided this time it would NOT be photo vacation... And now I regret.
 
I was shooting a zombie walk once, armed with two holgas. I had an old minolta flash on the one loaded with black and white, and I had velvia loaded in the one with the built in flash with rotating gels. I had the red gel selected, and i was firing and winding, and firing, and winding, going back and forth with the two cameras. Not a single person told me that the lens cap was on over the camera with the velvia, and I KNOW that most of my best pics from that night would have come from that camera. I shot the entire roll with the lens cap on.
 
Merkin said:
I shot the entire roll with the lens cap on.
Click to expand...

To Merkin and everybody else with similar stories: Lens caps are the enemy. Leave them at home. Buy a stack of UV filters instead. Get a folder. Whatever it takes. We don't need no stinkin' lens caps.

Yeah, I learned the hard way.
 
Dry firing a Shanghai TLR, and then realizing that the shutter won't cock unless there's film in it.

Done the lens cap several times. Trying to squeeze one more frame out, and snapping the film, forgetting on a folder whether I've wound on yet and getting blank frames and double-exposures. Shooting w/o a CF card, formatting the wrong card.

Right now, I've got a few 4x5 film holders in the bag, and half of them are exposed. Do you think I can remember which system I used?

Oh yeah... DIY lens repair with the parts tray tettering on your lap is not a good idea.
 
I had once a Mamiya 645 Pro on loan. I loaded it with Ektachrome 120 and proceeded to test it photographing my wife; the light was gorgeous, she was in a good mood and smiling. Then I went to the yard and had a blast shooting closeups of flowers and buds with the 80 f2.8 lens I had. In sum, i had high expectations from this roll of film.

When I finished it, I opened the film compartment... and the roll sprang out with an enthusiastic jump. When I saw it on the floor, unrollable, I realized that I had put it on backwards...

What else is there to do? I just laughed... and laughed some more... :)
 
Well, I did the "turning on the light with the paper box still open". This was even after I had checked the box was shut - but forgetting that I had just gone up a size, opening a new box of 10x8, and had checked the previous box of 5x7 :( Ever since then I have a better routine and never loosely close boxes/packets of paper. Always open for a moment, then totally closed again.

Exposing Kodachrome 64 as 400asa . . . only did that once too, but it took a while to figure out what had happened.

Exposing a roll twice because I somehow forgot to rip the leader off after the first time through.

Starting a lens repair and stupidly not making a digi-pic when I dismantled the auto-iris linkage on a nice M42 lens. Ooops, (my) memory is fallible after a week or so.

I'll stop now else my list will be longer than everyone else's.
 
In 85 in Bengla Desh I was allowed to take pictures of the factory in wich I was working ( technical work, no photographic ), the kind of factory you usually saw in 19 century in Europe, old machines, crowd of people, amazing situations, etc...
I brought with me my nikon F and a nikkormat, exposure with a lunasix 3
I loaded them with trix 400 and slides 64. I shot two rolls of 36, and guess what...:angel:

My 400 was exposed like a 64, and the 64 like a 400.

:bang::bang::bang::bang::bang::bang:

I rarely felt so miserable.
 
HMFriedman says never compare two termometers : yes, now I have the correct one and I always use it !
thanks robert
 
Made a cup of tea while I was developing in a Paterson tank in front of the kitchen window. Kettle boiled, I wondered why there was a black plastic lid over my mug, took it off and poured boiling water over my reels...
 
I left an M6, 35mm Cron., 90mm Cron. and 15mm Voigtlander in a taxi whilst trying to get to a train station on time. Luckily the driver came after me saying "ya left ya bag mate." What a good guy.
 
principe azul said:
Made a cup of tea while I was developing in a Paterson tank in front of the kitchen window. Kettle boiled, I wondered why there was a black plastic lid over my mug, took it off and poured boiling water over my reels...
Click to expand...

LOL.
That reminds me of an interesting thread I read here long time ago:
"Which emulsion tastes best" with NickTrop as the OP (I think).

Or, on another level:
Fuji makes Japanese green tea, Kodak tastes like Lipton's yellow label and Ilford's are Earl Grey.
:)
 
So today I managed to get out of the house for a walk. Grabbed the Canon P which was indicating FP4+ on the film tab stuck into the cold shoe, and 6 exposures taken. Happily walking along the beach promenade, saw something interesting and took a picture.

With an empty camera. Realizing the error, put camera back in bag.

For the rest of that walk, I kept seeing pictures. All. The. Time.
 
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