Developing Idiocy

You would think by now I would have run out of stupid things to do. But no, I continue to advance the field of incompetence in new and interesting ways. Yesterday, after the Camera Faire we went to a car show in Leeds. I’d taken along a very old camera and I used it to take shots of very old cars. Today I had the pictures developed. They were all blank, which was upsetting, but part of the analogue photographer’s lot. Every now and then you (or at least I) load the film incorrectly, get the camera settings wrong or just leave the lens cap on.

I was sitting at my computer musing on this when I noticed a film cassette on the desk which looked remarkably like the one I had used yesterday. Which I had just had processed. After a bit of thought (always a good idea for me) I realised that in the morning I put one cassette on the desk and then picked up another. For a while I’ve had a cassette on my desk that had got wound all the way back in, and I was planning to find a suitable tool to recover the end of the film so I could use it in a camera. So the reason that the film was blank was because the film was blank.

I shot back had the correct film processed. This went a lot better. And I’m really pleased with the results (although I need to work on holding the camera straight).

The camera I used was made nearly 100 years ago. I think it does a pretty good job. When I get the right film processed. Kudos to the folks at Max Speilmann in Beverley who got the second film processed in record time.