I unfortunately made a terrible mistake just the other day. The very first assignment in my photography class was to go through a roll of film taking different pictures to get used to my camera and to check out all the different functions it has.

Well, the first thing you have to do before you can begin taking pictures is to… load the camera with film, right? Right. So. I bought a new roll of film at a local store and decided I wanted to capture a beautiful scene at our county’s reservoir. I take the film and put it in my camera while I’m sitting in my car at the lake. I was so excited to get to take some pictures, so I carefully and very thoughtfully took approximately 30 pictures. I thought wow this roll of film sure is long. My instructor mentioned in class that you are usually able to get more than the 24 exposures that the packaging claims. So I gave up on reaching the end of the roll and start the process to rewind the film. Well, it didn’t feel like it normally did when I had done this before. There was no tension on the winder. I thought to myself how strange… so I opened the cover and the film had not been wrapped around the spool the entire time I was “taking” pictures.

My husband felt so bad for me after he saw the disappointment in my eyes. He took the roll of film into the bathroom (because there is no windows) and somehow took it apart (there was a lot of banging around going on) and pulled the film back out and put it back together again. He is so sweet to do something like that for me.

Now, with the almost new roll of film I made sure when I loaded the camera this time I got it all the way around the spool. I was able to get developed 16 out of the 24 frames. However this batch of pictures weren’t quite as thought-out as the first ones I thought I was getting.

It is very important to make sure you load your camera correctly. Please double check that your film is around the spool before you begin taking any pictures. I told my instructor about this and how ignorant I felt about it. He then explained that it had happened to him before as well as most photographers, too. So if you have had it to happen to you or when it does happen to you for the first time, just remember, you have learned a valuable lesson that you will never forget.

It is better to try and make mistakes (and learn from them) than to never have tried at all.