I Messed Up A Roll of Kodak Gold Royally

The Joy of Shooting Film

I screwed up. In Paris.

I don’t know if I should be mad, or sad. I was excited about a few photos that were never recorded onto any media. It took me a few hours after I got my negatives back to figure out what happened.

We were walking to the Eiffel Tower when I finished a roll of Portra 400. I took it out and loaded a roll of Gold. Everything went swimmingly, coz I’m a damn pro. I kept shooting along the Seine all the way to the tower. I shot a few frames I really loved(or so I thought).When my film count dial hit 40, my advance lever kept going. I froze. Something was wrong. I advanced a few more frames, released the shutter at random angles, and the camera kept going. At the time, I thought I loaded the film wrong, and the perfs didn’t get hooked onto the teeth, which meant nothing was recorded. It had happened before. Pro, right? So without much thought, I opened my camera, outdoors, in the warm Parisian sunshine, coz that’s what a pro does. I peeked inside the camera, and saw coiled Kodak Gold on the right. The longest efffffffffffffffffffffff shot out of me. I put the baseplate back on rewound the film back, and took the canister out, hoping I didn’t ruin everything. Oh the blind optimism!

When I got the scans back, this particular roll only had 27 scans, majority of which were blurry shots at random angles. It was puzzling. Not until I got the negatives back did I kind of figure out what had transpired.

Here’s what I think happened. The film was not loaded properly. Perfs, teeth, you know, didn’t work. When I thought I was shooting at the beginning of the roll, the film didn’t advance at all. But somehow, after I was “shooting” for a while, the film got hooked properly and started advancing. And that is why when the count dial hit 40-usually it stops at 37-38 tops- I had only exposed about 1/3 of the roll, with over 20 frames left. Then I fired some random shots before opening the camera…. When I finally took out the canister, there were still about 10 frames left unexposed. Anyway, in the end I got 9 frames out of the entire roll, most of which had minor light leaks on them. All the rest were goners, plus the shots that never were.

I am mad at my stupidity, sad about never getting the shots I wanted, mad a bit more for wasting the film. I keep thinking about how silly I was pointing my camera at Paris, not knowing there was no film in it.

The moral of this story is: why bother! Just shoot with an iPhone.

Here’s a photo of the blank negatives, I thinking of framing it and writing SHAME in blood red letters. Where should I hang it?

Here’s a few photos that survived my stupidity.

Survivors

Here’s one of the random shots, and it’s not even the worst.

I sincerely hope you get some shadenfreude from my misfortune, which would make this whole thing worth it. See ya!