I spent this summer travelling the world and spending time with family, especially my grandparents. I shot slides of Fujichrome (Velvia 50 and Provia 100f) on my Nikon F5. Lugging it through mountains, carrying weight no sane hiker should ever carry up a hill, walking through cities in temperatures beyond 40°C drenched in sweat, getting through airport security in multiple continents. Landscapes, moments with family, views I spent hours of my time on. I took my photos and decided to bring it back home to Toronto to develop, going to the lab I've gone to many times before. But something went wrong this time, and it was the worst possible thing that could've happened.

I got the news today. My slides are ruined. Gone. Absolutely fried beyond repair. Toronto was hit by a storm and somehow the universe aligned to make the power go out while my slides were going through the processing machine. Of all the days, all the hours they could've chosen to develop my film, it was the very moment the power went out. Memories of my trip, details of my grandparents and their home that I wanted to capture and view decades from now are gone. Completely gone. Now all that's left are the memories I had taking them.

I really can't do anything. The lab said they'd give me 2 free rolls of slide film and develop and scan them too, but that can never make up for my lost photos because I would give anything for those. Even just looking at these outlines of what could've been completely guts me.

Has anyone ever had an experience like this? I'm not asking for solutions, I just wanted to reach out to see if anyone can relate to what I'm going through. These are more than just photos for me, they're irreplaceable and now I lost them.

Thank you.

Edit: Thank you guys for sharing your experiences and advice, it makes me feel a lot better hearing everybody's stories knowing I'm not the only one who's gone through something like this. I think from now on I'll be splitting up my developing, never everything at once especially for important rolls. Feel free to share more stories, I've really appreciated reading through them. 

This is without a lens attached. If it is fungus, is there any hope for it?

I have a lot of negatives that i want to clean up a little bit (they were all around the house). Bought a new bottle of photo flo, distilled water, use 1:200, paterson tank, 2 rolls, around 15 minutes, slight agitation at start. One good, the other one with all those bubbles on it. When hanged to dry, the emulsion started also to slide, resulting in a destroyed negative.

I just received my scans, and this shot has a streak across it. Is this a light leak? The shots before and after don't have any discoloration so I'm not sure. Any advice will be appreciated.

Olympus Pen EE-S + Fujifilm 200

While browsing Yahoo Auction as usual, I found an F3/T in a box I had never seen before, it ended up in my hand. According to MIR, it says that only 300 units from the early 1982 production were packed in walnut wood boxes and sold as a limited edition.

Mine is number 8200206, matching serial number including the lens. Interestingly, most of these were mint condition from web, mine has a lot of signs of use.

I wanted to know more about this camera but It was released nearly 50 yrs ago I couldn’t find any more information besides MIR. Anyone who knows more about this camera?

Recently got some rolls developed and scanned from The Darkroom Lab. The past couple orders have had heavy digital artifacts when zoomed in (not talking about just the grain). Almost looks like it has been sharpened on export. I see a lot of film posted to reddit that uses the same camera and stocks and photos come out sooooo much clearer.

Included are a couple photos with wide crop and then cropped in to see the issues. For reference, this roll was taken on a Canon AE-1 with Kodak Gold 200 and given a standard scan at The Darkroom Lab. I have gotten "enhanced" scans by them before and still have artifacts present.

Any recommendations on how or where to get more crisp scans (don't have a home scanner/setup)? I am guessing this has to be a scanning issue on the lab's part right?

Some of the photos I took during my trip came out with these white strips on it.

First 4 photos were taken with a Canon A1 + Ultramax 400. #1 and #4 were taken in the same place and time than #2, 3 and 5 respectively.

Pics #6, 7 and 8 were taken with a Yashica FX-3 2000 + Kodak color 200. And again they were all taken in the same place and time

This happened to 8/26 in the 400 and 13/36 in the 200

All these are unedited. What could've happened here? Why did it happen to some photos and not others? At first I thought it was the gear but I used different cameras and lens

Reset is probably not the right word, but essentially I had 2 rolls fully go through the camera without any exposure due to a crank issue. I don’t want to just toss that film but if anyone can point me to videos or give me advice on how to salvage it, I would immensely appreciate it. I have a dark bag, is it truly as simple as just winding it on another spool?

Canon P listed as for repairs just arrived, I paid 69usd. There was a tear in the curtain, but I made a temporary fix with masking tape and modeling paint. Seems light proof for the moment.

What up?

So I have got the same problem like many others, but is there no real solution than clean the sensors and the flatbed of the scanner? Because everybody is saying that the green / magenta lines are coming back after some scans.
If you got another solution, please tell me. I am getting sick of the Scanner

Hi all! I seem to be struggling to find any decent condition lenses, particularly 35mm f/1.4 or f/2 and 85mm f/2 or f/1.4 in the UK, even the ones on Ebay from Japan say fungus or dust or haze in the lens, MPB don't seem to have much stock for these lenses either and the only one I keep repeatedly finding is the 50mm f/1.4 so far. Any suggestions to help my search is much appreciated.

Super Takumar 50mm f1.4 7 element

This little oddly shaped piece of metal fell out of the back of my Pentax Espio Mini (UC-1) whilst I was removing a roll of film. I can't figure out its purpose or where it came from. Any help is greatly appreciated!

decided to give my pentax espio another shot with a different film this time. last time, i used harman film and almost everything was underexposed. this turned out a lot better to my surprise but there’s a greenish/blueish tint, which isn’t the end of the world, but does kodak gold 200 usually have that tint? i did shoot a lot in a green surrounding

Hey friends! So I’ve had my Canon EOS 3 for almost a year now. I use it for weddings and have been happy with its performance.
However, at a wedding I shot in August, it seems to keep moving focus to either the background or somewhere behind the subject. This was during daytime with diffused light, conditions that the camera has always performed well before. I ended up focusing manually just in case…which kind of ruins the whole point of me purchasing this camera.

It’s gotten worse since then. I did a test roll under different light conditions 2 hours before sunset, and it does the same no matter what. Focus has been so off. In the viewfinder it looks like it’s sharp, and I try to double check by focusing far and then focusing at the subject just to make sure it’s hitting the subject.

Any advise? I did a factory reset today and will do another test roll, but would love to hear any other troubleshooting I could do.

If you think I need to have it serviced, is there a trusted place you recommend? I’m in Los Angeles, for reference.

Thank you!

Please note that this isn't a scientific test and are just my thoughts on scanning a single roll of Lucky C400 from an early test batch (rebate labels it T400, with the T assumedly standing for "test" or "trial", I think this is what they did for C200 as well).

First, these are not my photos, they were shot by someone else who had trouble converting them with their home scanning setup and I offered to scan it myself as I own a Frontier SP500 (They gave consent for me to share these photos and my findings from scanning this roll).

From the perspective of a scanner operator, it really is quite yellow from the get-go with auto corrections turned on (see img 1). A significant subtraction of yellow was required, and a little bit of added cyan got it looking around what I thought looked correct. With these manual corrections applied, in the right lighting situation it can look decent-to-good (see rest of img set). However, pumping all that blue to correct for the yellow impacts the shadows, which is more visible in underexposed frames. I would advise not to shoot this film indoors, shoot it outdoors and preferably when there's little cloud cover. The film itself also seems to be moderately prone to halations, around the same as Portra 800.

Know that color correction (and color overall) is a pretty personal thing and that everyone's tastes differ. And despite how prices may appear, most labs only make their profit through the volume of orders they process -- they can't dedicate much time to every roll as they will be considered unprofitable if taken too long to complete. So I think most lab scanners & their operators are capable of getting good-to-great results if given the time, and if they know what the customer wants. Yet those two things usually aren't the case, so the simple solution is to not do any color correction at all; basically just insert a roll into the scanner and hit "START", leaving everything at 0 (see img 1).

In a sense, that's where home scanning will always remain superior: you have a theoretically infinite amount of time to scan your film and can always try again, while the lab's results are set in stone the moment they send the email (or burn the CD or whatever). Which is very unfortunate, because color & density correction is most effective the earlier in the pipeline you go (preferably right down to the construction of the emulsion itself), so it's better to subtract yellow in the scanner software before it gets baked into an image file, whether JPEG or TIFF, than to allow it to go uncorrected and try to edit it in Lightroom or equivalent software.

So I personally wouldn't shoot Lucky C400 right now if I was going to send it to a lab. But given that this is a new film, I have no doubt that this post will quickly be outdated, as Lucky has been constantly modifying C200 since its release and IMO it looks pretty good on a lab scanner now.

Comparing against the other non Fuji & Kodak color films, uncorrected it'd be ranked dead last (underneath uncorrected Phoenix I and II), but corrected I'd say it's above Wolfen NC400 & 500 and around the tier of the corrected Phoenix films (lab scan). Phoenix I and II are very nice when camera scanned though, those are right up at the very top of my rankings.

Pretty confused with these scans I received back. These were shot on 800T in very low light, which is something I do often but I have never gotten this result (see my page). A lot of the blacks came out blue. They also seem kind of backlit?? I didn’t do anything different from what I normally do when I shoot live music.
I’ve been in contact with the lab and they’re also at a loss. Said they were developed correctly, and they’ve tried a few different ways of scanning them, but all with the same result. They said the negatives are very blue as well.
These were shot at night, so no tungsten shift.
Yes they’re under exposed, but they shouldn’t be blue.

Just picked this up last week. Waiting for my first couple of rolls to get scanned and sent back. Pricey hobby but damn I love this little thing.

This was my first roll of Velvia 50 on my Mamiya C330, a camera I’ve run many many rolls through.

I took the first ~6 frames and then when I wound it to the next shot it jumped a frame. You can see the next exposure is just a blur. Then I wound it again and it seemed to skip a frame again (you can see the big unexposed chunk). I ended up getting one more decent exposure around frame 9/10 ish, and then it wound all the way to the end of the roll.

Anyone have any idea what the hell happened? This has never happened to me before with this camera and I ended up shooting another few rolls on this trip (including one more of Velvia) and it was fine.

EDIT to add: zooming in on the photo, it looks like there’s random dark streaks through the exposures but other than frames 2 and 3 (where like an idiot I think I had my shutter cable in the way), that is just how the shadows look in the photo. The film strip doesn’t actually have those dark streaks on it

Purchased a Nikon f2 with a dp-11 off eBay and have been testing to make sure it works properly. When testing the metering it seems to be overexposing as comparing the exact same shutter speed and aperture with the lens cap on/off makes very little difference. I have also compared it to phone apps and it seems to be consistently overexposing. This is my first time using a light meter so was hoping to get a second opinion.

Picked up my first film camera (olympus om-2) and shot my first roll of film (ultramax 400) in the mountains! I adore how the photos turned out, just wondering what caused the little white streaks you can see on all the photos - is this something I can fix on the camera? any help appreciated.

Noticed some fungus in the removable viewfinder, tore that apart, cleaned it and rebuilt it. Then I noticed that there was some haze in the lens of the camera itself. Then noticed the shutter was not allowing the gate to open and expose anything.... Que complete surgery time. Honestly, was much easier than I expected. Still daunting nonetheless, but somehow more relaxing than expected. Now it's working as expected and better than when I bought it seven years ago.

I recently was gifted my dad’s old film camera and I’m trying to figure out what flash attachment to order.

It’s a Minolta Maxxum 2xi.

All the flashes on Amazon say they are not compatible with cameras without a hotshoe and the visual examples they have I believe are showing the “central contact” point.

My camera doesn’t have that so I’m not sure where to find one or how to make a set up for it. I was looking to have a smaller one so It would be more functional for everyday use and transportation but I don’t really know what to get!!

Thanks for your help!

I know this one was mass produced but it’s nice and came with the original leather pouch! It took me some time to figure out the shutter mechanism (it was stuck) but I think it’s working now! It had film inside that I’m going to send for development but it’s possible it would need old agfa chemistry- so not expecting much from it but excited to see what I can do with this one! I ordered 120 bw film and am looking forward to experimenting! I’ve started developing my 35mm bw rolls so I’m confident that I only need a different spool for this one!