Photographic disasters

24th June 1989 Wattisham.
Wandering the static whan a Land Rover pulled up with an ATC instructor mate of mine in the passenger seat “Quick” says he with a grin “don’t ask any questions jump in and bring your camera”.
That day I had chosen to ‘go without’ as it were so I borrowed father in laws Minolta with a 28/70 on the front and of we sped.
My treat ? 20 minutes of free wandering ‘the dump’, full of Phantoms the lone Canberra and tons of interesting odd and ends. 😀 🙂 😀

Yes you guessed it 36….37…38…39…40…………………….oh bugger 😡
That never to be repeated moment had gone….guess we have all been there at some time 🙁

Landing up at the Indian Air Force Museum way back in 1989 – still a kid. with a Russian model camera – and no film! :P… ah atleast I managed to ‘locate’ the place for future visits. I remember the Hurricane was in plain silver finish – too bad i missed a color shot of it from that time.

in the ’80s (forget which year), as a very wide-eyed kid, spending all day with the OFMC at Rochester airshow – lovely shots of MH434, me with Ray and Mark Hanna, clicked away all day…

no film in the camera!

Disaster 1: In the back seat of a Jaguar T-bird, doing CLOSE formation with another T-bird. Lots of ‘ that’s it luvie, closer..closer, now flaunt it’ on the r/t from my pilot to the other ac. Meanwhile I have a viewfinder full of Jag from every angle – happy days. On the ground, film removed, put ‘somewhere really safe’. A week later, can’t find the film – and never do. AARRGGHHHH!

Disaster 2 (can’t claim this one, but was there): 6 Puma helicopters on Ex Purple Star (’96) in USA visit Wright Field. Decide to do a 5 ship arrow flypast. Photos arranged to be taken from the sixth Puma, which is to hover as the formation flies towards and then underneath it, framed by Wright Field in the background. Photographer is a real enthusiast with a Haselblad TLR. Formation duly flies as briefed and photo is taken. Photographer suddenly thinks there is no film in the camera, opens up the back, and there IS film in the camera. Doh! Meanwhile a crewman who was also on board has taken a pic with his point and shoot. Never did see the result…

Despite being more than twenty years ago I am still upset about loosing a 36 print film at a Duxford airshow. I usually use 24 exposure so there was more to loose than normal. I finished the film whilst helping out at the show, airside. During the afternoon my belongings ended up in a neat pile on the apron, until a departing aircraft blew it all against the fence. The film must have rolled into the crowd, among the lost images were a DC8 taxiing around stn with only three engines installed, the last flight of the last CAAFU Dove & a CL44-6 Yukon at Manston 🙁 😡
More recently my trusty OM20 has developed a minor fault that results in new films not winding on, unless you manually reset the film release lever. I found this out to my cost after taking a series of photo’s of the AN22 taking off from stn.

The out of whack colors of the Firefly from bad film processing…very contrasty…

Mark

Mk 12-I gather you were in Greenwood’s Spit?

Disaster #1…air to air with Eddie Kurdziel’s Firefly a few summers ago, shot 4 rolls of slide film, 3 rolls of print, the film lab processed ALL of them as print film….now the SLIDE film looks slightly off, like slides shot for an old National Geographic, all the colors slightly out of whack with what they SHOULD be…but still useable…thank god for print film.

Disaster #2, WAAAYY back before I started shooting seriously, big warbird show in Denver in 1988, I took a junk camera and a roll of film to the show, shot 36 exposures of the planes, they all wound up on the first frame…..seems the camera had torn the advancing holes on the film and it never moved…

Disaster #3, sent my partner Denise up in a T-6 to Photograph Bill Greenwood and the Spit…got three rolls of him on film, the developers processed it AGAIN as print film and botched the whole batch (in his defense, we WERE rolling our own film at the time and we did put slide film into regular print film containers, he said he thought it was print film, despite us telling him otherwise).

Mark

Legends 2003. Loaded 2 consecutive films wrongly in an Olympus OM-2N that I’d owned and used for over 20 years. I’d never done it before, or since. I wondered why the motor-drive seemed so fast.

Getting airborne at Oshkosh for some serious formation flying with Mk XIV Spitfire NH749 and a bunch of P-51s, to find that the frame counter on my newly acquired but second hand Exacta Varex, a later model to back up to my trusty and faithful older Varex, counted from 36 down to 1 rather than my original which counted 1 up to 36. You guessed it – two shots and that was it. Here is the final shot. 🙁 Now I’ve never made that mistake again.

Mark

This one takes some beating 🙂

I have shooting without film in my camera on severall occasions. My biggest disaster was however during an air to air shoot with the CAF. While in a T6 I shot both the HE-111 and Sea Fury in the air that morning, 2 rolls on each. When back home severall weeks later I had two all black rolls that were never used and 2 rolls used double, with all the images on it worthless. So far with digital things are still problemless. BW Roger

That’s why I love digital cameras. You don’t have to pay for all the prints of blurred, out of focus or half way out of the frame pictures any more! Flying Legends used to cost me a fortune in film.

YR

Steve.

Not as bad as this one!

Only wanted the toilet block and some fool walked in the way…..

Robbo off for the traditional last nervous pee before going on ops in Just Jane.

Regards,

kev35

Not mine, belongs to the other half, but, stood in sub zero temperatures on the bridge at Hatton Cross, eagerly awaiting the take off of the last BA001, only to find that the camera had suffered with the cold and the shutter froze closed on the picture and he missed seeing any of the take off and got no pictures either.

Shame cos it really was a pretty take off in the dark!

Dozens of shots of grass / my feet / aircraft with tannoys in the way / backs of peoples heads.

Also took a photo of Robbo once, now that WAS bad… 😉

My memory card that I took to Hawaii last week b*ggering up and not letting me get the photos off (over 150 photos, inculding HNL airport and Hickham AFB etc). Fingers crossed it’s not quite a disaster yet though. I have since sent the card off to a company who deal with data retrieval, and so hopefully they can do something with it.

Missing the Concorde/Red Arrows flyby over Buckingham Palace at the queens golden jubilee.