Any mishaps you didn't know until you got the film back?

Yes, bu much few now than years ago.

The scene: a winter sea kayak trip on BC's north coast in 1991, from the end of October to mid December. A record was set for lack of direct sunshine, so it drizzled and/or bucketed rain almost constantly. The nights at that time of year are about 16 hours long and the sun is low on the horizon even at noon, which is to say light levels were low all the time.

We brought my Wista 4x5 and a Pentax K1000 which both worked flawlessly, but also brought a dunkable pseudo waterproof automatic point & shoot fixed lens 35mm camera as well. It was meant to be the 'grab a shot while paddling in the pouring rain camera.

When the big box of developed slides came back, every shot taken by the point & shoot was pretty much solid black. It must have gotten bumped on the first day because it stayed on the fastest shutter speed and smallest aperture for every shot. Being fully automatic there was no way of knowing. There is an ever deepening pit in the bottom of the stomach which keeps getting deeper and darker as you open up and look through dozens of slide containers and hundreds of black blank slides...

Some memories remain, like when we traveled with a group of teenaged Sea Lions for an hour or more, all of us jockeying for position within several feet of each other to milk back eddies along cliffs while traveling against the tide, walls of spray being lifted off the water during a hurricane force storm, or thousands of Surf Scoters taking off and passing over our heads. The sound of their wing tips was amazing.

Some images are never lost...

Vaughn said:

Some images are never lost...

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...and gain a patina of deeper meaning over time.

A hint of the Scoter experience with a flock about 1/10th the size we had fly over our heads:

MattKing said:

I shot a lot of weddings and portraits - almost all with medium format.
I've never used any instant materials, except a couple of times for fun.
I always took some sort of backup equipment with me. The equipment was checked and maintained. And I was familiar with its operation.
If you use well maintained photographic equipment regularly it almost always works as expected. And when it doesn't work as expected, any problems are usually obvious.

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I was hired as a camera "loader and unloader" at a "society ball". There were two professional photographers and me along with 5 f3.5 Rolleiflex TLR cameras. After each photographer finished a roll of film, he would hand me the camera and pick up another. I would then take out the film, mark a number on it and load a new roll in that camera. Everything went fine, Next day, however, I was told that one roll had gone through a Rolleiflex twice. The three of us tried for an hour to get a roll of film to go through a Rolleiflex twice without respooling it. We could not do it. But I had done it causing us to lose 24 pictures of paying customers. That was over 50 years ago and I have never known of anyone but ME who has done that........Regards!

I could see that on 220--accidentally running it backwards--but the lack of tape on the tail end makes me wonder how that would happen. I don't know Rolleis to know if there is a possibility their film path could still run the film through backwards.

The only way that could happen with a Rollei or any other 120 film camera is if and only if someone took an exposed roll and rewound it in the dark to its beginning and re-taped the film.

The Rolleiflex, unlike many 120 cameras, has automatic film start sensing, so you don't need to wind to the start mark on the backing paper. Normally if you started loading from the back of the roll, you would notice right away while looking at the backing paper, as the marks would be wrong. On a Rolleiflex, you don't need to look at the paper as closely. However, if you then wound the film on, the free tail end would likely curl up in the supply chamber and make a mess, unless it was stuck to the paper somehow and made it over the rollers into the takeup chamber. The only way that I could imagine it happening is if the film was really stuck to the tape (humidity?) Even then it's hard to figure out how the back, base side of the film would get stuck.

I process myself so my surprises are usually immediate .

A few years back I did my first Fujichrome run with a Jobo CPP2 and Pro6 chemistry. Slides of vacation Yellowstone, Tetons etc. I read in the old notes on Jobo's website (from the 1990's ?) To extend 1st developer from 6'30" to 7'30" for Fuji films. Thank goodness I auto bracketed, the underexposed slides were pretty close to normal. Now with freshly mixed 1st developer I start at 6 minutes.

I'm going to make some E6 test strips one of these days.

The only 35mm I've sent "away" was a mistake. Never had any problem with 120 WAS E6 in the last days of reliable regional. Nail in the analog coffin.

After developing two rolls of film I noticed areas that seemed slightly indicative of a light leak. The cause: the bright luminous dial of my diving watch. Removed watch before developing next 14 rolls.
I agree with an earlier comment that the way to avoid mishaps with camera equipment is to keep equipment in good working order. Bach in early 1960s, I remember Consumer Reports or some similar publication queried camera repair shops with regard to which cameras were sent in for service. On this basis the magazine reported that the worse cameras were Leica, Nikon and Hasselblad. Of course, in reality these were the most popular cameras worked hard by busy professionals who could not risk camera failure.
Equipment failure should not be judged by wasting a couple rolls of film, but by the loss of events and time that will never occur again.

railwayman3 said:

An intermittent shutter fault on a Minox 35mm, so that half the frames were blank......not obvious on taking, as the normal "click" was still heard. I find it's a common fault with these cameras, and the shots were not irreplaceable, so very frustrating but not a disaster. (Anyone know a good repairer in the UK who can deal with these cameras, advice appreciated ? )

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if it's the GT, i fixed that myself a few times. let the camera go 20 years ago, so cannot be sure now, but i think there was a "pivot" screw for the shutter blades coming loose; a design booboo, the rotation of the blades was in the "unscrewing" direction, should be the other way. very obvious once you open it and fire. a half-turn of the screwdriver does it... i have ten thumbs on my paws, so it must have been really easy

Arklatexian said:

I was hired as a camera "loader and unloader" at a "society ball". There were two professional photographers and me along with 5 f3.5 Rolleiflex TLR cameras. After each photographer finished a roll of film, he would hand me the camera and pick up another. I would then take out the film, mark a number on it and load a new roll in that camera. Everything went fine, Next day, however, I was told that one roll had gone through a Rolleiflex twice. The three of us tried for an hour to get a roll of film to go through a Rolleiflex twice without respooling it. We could not do it. But I had done it causing us to lose 24 pictures of paying customers. That was over 50 years ago and I have never known of anyone but ME who has done that........Regards!

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Or, the photographer inadvertently double exposed each frame since the lever to advance the film in the Rollei is also used to reset the shutter without advancing the film in order to deliberately do double exposures. It has been known to happen that the lever is inadvertently activated for double exposures - ahem. Would a pro do so on an entire film without noticing it? I don't know, maybe. It's more plausible than sending an exposed roll back through the camera without that being apparent. Mystery...

If the images on each frame were taken right after each other or not would answer that question.