Friday, March 18, 2011

Unrolling A Film

I shot one roll of film through a camera last week before realizing that the shutter did not open at all. Now I've read about unrolling the film from an already wounded roll few years back, but never had a chance to do it. What I did is take another roll of unwanted film, lick it and stick it into the film canister. The saliva is supposed to snag on to the film leader and drag the film out to be reused, but trust me this is harder than it sounds. I managed the feat after half an hour.


Here are some tips that I've learned.
1) Never lick the film. Uggghhhh! The unwanted film had already been developed and the chemicals tasted terrible. Spit or rub some saliva on it, but never lick it!
2) Make sure you insert the unwanted film deep enough. A good measure of how deep is when you see the film canister rolling (the pic below) in response to your pushing, then you know you've latched onto the film.


3) Try turning the film around in the canister. Sometimes when the film has been rewound, the leader has gone too far inside and its difficult to latch on to it. Turn it around a bit and try again, if the leader is in the right position then it will come out easily.