Once upon a time, Buzz and I went out for lunch and a little picture taking. I sat in the car and took out my Pentax to load it with film. Half a second after opening the back, I slammed it shut; I already had film in the camera.
Oops.
I figured I would lose a couple of pictures, but the rest of the roll should be fine, so I went about taking a picture of anything that caught my eye. I got the film developed and some pictures did get blown out.
But then there was this happy little accident:
A few days ago, I scanned in my latest batch of pictures. Once again, this included a roll that was accidentally exposed not once, but twice! It wasn’t the Pentax but my Zorki rangefinder, which has a somewhat quirky counter, so picking it off the shelf after a few months of not using it, I couldn’t tell for sure if there was still film in it or not.
There was.
Oops.
Again, I went about my picture-taking business, thinking that the worst that could happen would be a few ruined pictures and maybe even another happy accident. I finished the film and started to rewind. When I was sure it was all back in the canister, I opened the back.
It wasn’t all the way back in the canister.
Oops.
It’s hard to say what was to blame for the quality of the rest of the film – the exposure to light, or my inexperience with judging the correct settings without a light meter needle helping me along. Many of the pictures that weren’t ruined with very non-cool/retro light leaks were either far too dark or too light.
But it wasn’t a total wash. I did manage to get at least one good picture out of that poor abused roll of film.
Maybe there’s hope for me.
How talented you are such that your “oops” are works of art. What fun to find happy accidents, eh?
I keep joking with Buzz, saying that opening the back cover should now be my “thing.” It’ll be my trademark
And you are very kind to consider my absent-mindedness combined with luck as ‘talented’
[...] would have to finish the last few pictures on the roll a few days later. As long as I didn’t forget it was in there and try twice to open the camera back, this would be no [...]