n3eg Loc: West coast USA

Tried to shoot a concert once for my wife with a 3x point and shoot. She was not happy. Justified my purchase of a bridge camera the next year.

strobe Loc: Central Iowa

I was the photographer for my high school annual, more than 4 decades ago now. I used Tri-X Pan (Black & White) film and pushed it from 400 - about 1200 and took mostly indoor photos without a flash. I learned to hand hold a 100MM lens, well, a 50MM with a 2X adapter, at a 1/30 second exposure and get most of them to turn out. More were spoiled by subject movement that camera movement.

I had just taken my last photo on a role of film and rewound it into the cassette when the class dismissal bell rang and I gathered up all my stuff to go to my next class intending to swap rolls in the camera after I got to my next class. (Notice absence of actually installing the new role of film in this sequence of events.)

In my next class I was taking some pictures. Of course, back then film and processing and printing was comparatively expensive, although I did all my own darkroom work and loaded my own cassettes from 100' bulk roles to hold the cost down. I agreed to use my own film and print all the pictures that were desired for the annual, but then at the end of the year, all the negatives were mine to keep. Both the school and I thought we were getting the long end of the stick with this agreement.

One of my classmates complained about all the photos I was taking and another one chimed in that I didn't have any film in the camera. Oh my! That reminded me that I didn't have any film in the camera. I quickly confirmed that to myself by turning the rewind knob and it turned freely. OH Oh! It should have been tight if there was film in the camera. OOPPSS!!!!!!!

On a lark I confessed that I didn't have film in the camera and even opened the back of the camera and showed them that in fact the camera was empty. The class started and I had to put down my camera and pay attention to the teacher.

I vowed, to myself, never to make that mistake again, and I don't think I did. But, the benefit of my 'mistake' was that the next day everybody thought that my camera didn't have any film in it, when in fact it did.

So, about once every 6 weeks or so, I intentionally didn't put film in my camera and was just really obnoxious with it, getting right up in people's faces. When they guessed I didn't have film in the camera I'd put my finger to my lips, to indicate that it was a secret, and then open the back of the camera to show them it was empty.

After that, most people, most of the time, believed that I didn't have film in the camera and totally ignored me, or hammed it up for the camera, which was even better. In fact, I could show someone the empty camera and then load film into it, right in front of them, and they'd still think that it was empty.

Word however did get back to the adviser for the annual that I was taking pictures without film in the camera and he was concerned that I was not getting the pictures that they needed for the annual. I showed him the contact sheets of the pictures I had actually taken, and explained my ruse to him, and he was delighted with the results.

My ruse became folk lore that was passed from photographer to photographer down through the years. My parents moved out of town the summer after my freshman year in college so I lost most connections to my high school. Several years later I ran into a high school classmate who had a younger sibling still in my high school and he'd heard from the sibling that the annual photographers still spent most of time without film in their cameras.

The annual staff had to send in to the publisher the first 16 pages by Thanksgiving time and when the representative of the printer of the annual books came by the school after Christmas he asked the adviser how much the budget for the annual was increased. The adviser confessed that it had actually been reduced. He was astounded that we could afford all the professional pictures on a reduced budget. Nope, none of them were professional. Just a kid who carried a camera almost as much as he wore glasses and took lots of pictures. Now a days the analogy would be like kids carry a cell phone. I considered that if I got 1 good picture out of a roll of 36 it was a successful roll.

That plan for getting people to ignore me and my camera worked great for the last two years of high school and the two years of Jr. College where I was also a photographer for the annual.

Cdouthitt Loc: Traverse City, MI

Shot a wedding with a new power grip (never used one before). All night long I was having focusing issues, and the AF was locking on nothing. Missed a lot of shots....but it acted up very randomly, maybe one in every 4 or 5 shots. The next day the camera functioned perfectly (without the grip). Then I put the grip back on...same issues as the night before. Turned out that the palm of the one hand was depressing the shutter button on the power grip at the same time that I was pressing the camera shutter...they apparently conflict with each other. Now I know why there was a lock switch...to shut the damn shutter button off on the grip. DOH!

Don't get, me started on film...apparently it's easy to load it backwards (on back to back rolls).

cactuspic Loc: Dallas, TX

Since I started photography as a young boy, I have had a chance to make a number of major blunders. The key thing is that I made so many bad mistakes that I was home free if I avoid making the same one twice. Among my disasters (now comic, then not so much): improperly loading the film so that it wasn't taken up by the advance sprocket, thinking I had rewound the film back into the canister then opening the camera back, advancing the film on shot too far and ripping the end of the film out of the canister, creasing the film when loading it into the development spool, forgetting to reset my ISO (it was ASA back then) when I changed film and probably a few other that I have mercifully forgotten. Luckily these disasters occured before I graduated high school in the early '70's.

tinwhistle

Made what could have been a "fatal" mistake. I was taking pictures of the RR yard and trains while in Columbus GA. Got so wrapped up in what I was doing I didn't look before stepping out into the road. The car missed me by about 6 inches. Have been super cautious about what is going on around me ever since then.

19104 Loc: Philadelphia

Out with my first dslr. Shot a big event with two bodies, I didnt know that the camera would.act like.it.was taking pics even with out memory card. So the one that I used the most had no memory card.

liberator Loc: Cambridgeshire, UK

In the early 1960s I was working for Kodak, in their London (UK) head offices. In fact I ran the darkroom for the Sales/Service Division. One Friday afternoon I was asked to develop a customer's film as a goodwill gesture. After fixing it it I popped it into the wash tank and ran the water. The excitement of the upcoming weekend meant I forgot to take it out before going home. On the Monday morning, after some 60+ hours of washing, I found all the emulsion had softened and washed off. It took some delicate explanations to the customer to placate him, plus some replacement film stock!

Szalajj Loc: Salem, NH

Took my memory card out of my camera while it went in for sensor cleaning, and didn't think to replace it before trying to take some head shots for a friend. Tried to transfer the images to a flash drive for her, and there wasn't a single image there. We went back out and re-shot them.

I have since set the camera so that it won't shoot without a card in place.

Last weekend, I didn't change from slip on shoes into hiking boots. While rock hopping to shoot some tidal pools, one of my shoes slipped off. At some point, I hyper extended my knee to the point that I should have been on crutches for the next 24 hours. Lesson learned, I will be adding a check to ensure that my footwear is appropriate to the shooting location as I'm gathering my equipment and leaving my vehicle.

lehighjack Loc: somewhere in FL

Once, with my OMD-1 was doing candids at the wedding of one of my friends and I realized that the motor drive (or I) had advanced the film so that it tore free from the canister. I turned off the camera and took it to the neigborhood photography store and they were able to salvage 11 shots. The bad news was that they were out of focus.
About three years ago, I was taking pictures of some of the Vendors with my Minolta DSLR at a Flea Market; we managed to spent a great deal of time posing them and making sure that the exposure was correct. I checked each shot in the LCD screen before going to the next. The pix were for a monthly publication and the deadline was that day. When I returned to my office i discovered that the Compact Flash Card was sitting in my computer and three hours were wasted looking a the shots from the buffer. Rushed back and reshot what I could, live and learn...

Bullfrog Bill Loc: CT

I once went to shoot the Mermaid Parade at Coney Island and took about 400 shots of people in costume. When I got home I put my card in the reader and was so excited to see the images as they appeared on the screen. Since I had another shoot planned for the afternoon, I grabbed the card out of the reader, put it in the camera body and reformatted it. The only problem was that in my excitement to see the Mermaid parade images on screen, I forgot to hit the import button in LR - all images lost.

Triplets Loc: Reading, MA

In Tahiti on my honeymoon 25 years ago. I had a Canon AE1-P film camera. On our last day there we decided to rent a scooter and circle the island. So I loaded a 36 exp roll in the camera and off we went. We were gone 4-5 hours, stopping along the way at various spots for photo ops. I had even crawled over a boulder (later to discover that it was loaded with ants that found their way down my swim trunks) and propped the camera on a rock and secured it with branches and twigs to take an early version of a selfie of myself and my new bride. Beautiful day, tropical beaches, incredible scenery. We stopped to have strangers take our picture with these beautiful backgrounds. We get back to our thatched roof hut where the evening festivities were about to start which included a clam bake on the beach using hot stones and seaweed. I took several pictures of the unveiling of the cooking pit along with some of the tiki torches that lined the dining area. I remembered thinking I was surely getting a lot of mileage from a roll of 36 exposures and started to get concerned. After what I figured was about 42-45 exposures, I panicked and opened the film door to discover the film had never caught on the advancement spokes -- NO PICTURES! Not happy.

Fatford Loc: Rock Hill, South Carolina

When I first got married I only had a Kodak pocket 110 camera. My friend let me borrow his Nikon. Had not problem most of the honeymoon, but in Niagara Falls I apparently didn't load the film correctly. Needless to say, no falls pictures. After that I learned how to check and have always since.

wowbmw Loc: Grant, Colorado

The biggest and most costly was turning my back to the ocean and gettin caught by a sneaker wave while shooting tide pools along the central Oregon coast. Lost my 5Dlll several lenses that I carried on a waist built and my iPhone. Not only that, discovered that my extra insurance I purchased to cover me while traveling did not include this type of loss. Had the equipment been stolen I would have been covered.

Lessons learned: Never turn your back on the ocean. Check your policy's fine print.

I'm now better prepared and thousands of dollars poorer.

boberic Loc: Quiet Corner, Connecticut. Ex long Islander

Too many to mention. But I do remember ruining a whole role of very important photos of a a charity event, I pushed the open the camera back button instead of the rewind button and trashed 36 exposures. I don't know how many shots of the inside of my lens cap I have made over the years.

brucebc Loc: Tooele, Utah

2013 went to Okinawa for two weeks to visit family. Went to and photoed all the cool places; aquarium, castles, beaches, tide pools and most important, grandkids. Lost the SD card before archiving the photos. Forgot to mention photos of Japan, South Korea, Guam and Hawaii. VERY VERY SAD. Think the card went off the desk into the trash.