I have made a lot of mistakes in my journey to learn film photography. In fact, I typically label my rolls, Trial & Error, and number them chronologically.
I’ve accidentally taken an entire roll of film when there was no film in the camera.
I’ve mailed a roll of 120 film to be developed only to discover that I had loaded the film backwards.
I had several rolls of film that had x-ray fog, likely due to sitting in high humidity during the summer in a slow moving mail truck or hot warehouse or other supply chain horror story.
Today, I got a call from the lab and the conversation began with, “We’re sorry, but . . . “ The film was inadvertently left in the developer too long (like 15 minutes too long). This is a mistake you can’t undo. It makes for very dense negatives and wild scans with high saturation and high contrast. I know this because the scans look like Halloween hipstamatic nightmares.
With all of this unpredictability, and the relatively low success rate, you might imagine I would give up and devote myself to the familiar and friendly territory of my digital camera. But for some reason I cannot fathom, I am not discouraged. In fact, I laughed today when the person from the film lab called. They were really good about owning their mistake and making it right with a refund and free film. They offered a free zoom call for my next roll to talk over any questions I might have and told me my work was good, really good, and maybe it was time to stop labeling every roll Trial & Error. (Of course, this may have just been flattery intended to soften the blow of their mistake. And if it was, I don’t care. It still felt good.)
I played with the scans this evening and most are simply not salvageable. There were three or four that might have been really good had they been developed properly, but I let that go. I was able to convert a few to black and white and put them down next to a few of my recent digital images and feel happy they had a home.
What’s that old adage? If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
