Salvaging A Potential Disaster

 I had a bit of a scare this week, I was out and about with my OM-1 shooting a roll of EZ400 and for some bizarre reason the film speed dial on my OM-1 fell off. It's screwed onto a plastic lug on the top plate, but a quick inspection showed it had been cross threaded. To be honest it's been a while since I used my OM-1 so I don't know how long it had been in this state. This left me in a bit of a quandry. I had set the dial to shoot the roll at 200 iso, purely for no other reason than I can, but after having shot 10 frames I was now totally uncertain that the setting I had selected was the correct one. I headed home a little deflated but also curious as to what the shots looked like.

If you ever suffer a problem part way through a roll, but don't want to waste a whole roll of film, it's easy to open your camera in a dark bag or a totally dark room and cut the film. Just remember to leave a little bit of film sticking out of the cannister. This is what I did and soon had the film I had shot loaded onto a reel and in my developing tank. I cut a little bit off the end of the now shorter roll of film I had left to form a leader ready to load for another day. I thought I had shot the film at iso 200, but now had no clue what iso it was. I decided to develop it using times I got from the New Classic Film website and hope for the best. I mixed some Rodinal 1+50 and got started.

When I had finished the process I opened the tank with some trepidation, not knowing how it had turned out. I carefully pulled the first few frames from the reel and I had some images! The negatives looked pretty decent, perhaps overexposed which is what I had gone for originally, but not as much as I thought. All sorts of thoughts had gone through my mind when developing the film ranging from very thin negatives to a totally black frame. I could see some nice detail in my negatives and breathed a sigh of relief as I hung the film to dry.

I scanned the film using my cheap and cheerful Ion Slides to PC scanner which is basically a 5mp phone camera in a box. It does the job when you want a quick scan to evaluate your results and has a user interface that inverts the negative to a positive automatically. Once I got them on my computer I had a look at each frame in Affinity Photo and did a basic edit, just to bring the brightness down a little and boost the contrast where necessary, no more than I could expect to do in a darkroom really and I am happy with them. It worried me when I got an unexpected problem with my camera, especially one that I had wanted since childhood, but it was also a great relief I managed to use the skills I have learned over the last year and a half to salvage some useable images.

Here are a few of my photo's from this short roll and I have posted all ten in an album on Flickr for you to see in full resolution. We will all have a disaster at some point with our film photography, indeed it's been a while since I had one, we have to rise to the challenge and see what we get out of it. Some days can be a nightmare, but the positive outcome has given a boost to my confidence in my skills as a film photographer. I hope you enjoy them.

EZ400 Flickr Album