I finished midterm exams yesterday, so today I decided to go out and take some photos. I was finishing the roll of Portra 400 I had in my camera. I shot up to frame 36, and without thinking, I tried to wind the camera again. Usually there is a lot of tension if you get to the end of the roll—not this time. The film tore with almost no extra force on the winder. When I got home, i blacked out my closet door with towels, turned off the light, and tried to feed the film back into the canister in the dark. That didn’t work at all. After trying for about 20 minutes I gave up, and accepted that I’d lost 36 photos.

I have them all in my EXIF log, so I may try to recreate my favourite ones on a new roll sometime. I think I’ll be more careful to rewind immediately after 36 now.

The second disappointment came after a lot of anticipation. My parents were able to pick up my first black and white roll from Lens and Shutter in Kelowna. I had asked for them to be scanned to a USB drive, and to be pushed to 1600. This was back in December. The USB drive came back empty, not a single scan on it.

It turns out that the clerk in Kelowna never wrote down on the envelope that I wanted it pushed to 1600, so they would have just developed at 400, and the photos are probably all underexposed and not worth scanning. I won’t be getting film processed there again.

I think I’ll put a roll of Ilford XP2 Super in my camera for now. It’s nice and cheap here. And as long as I don’t tear the film it’s pretty hard for the lab to screw up C-41 processing. Hopefully soon I’ll have some black and white photos to share.