Wedding photo mistake

by Anwar Swolinski
(Delaware)

One of my fraternity brothers was getting married. He asked me to take pictures for him and his bride. This was back in the day of 35mm film photography.

Well, you know what happens when a bunch of fraternity brothers get together: the drinks are flowing. During the reception, I needed to rewind the film in my Minolta xd-11 camera. You had to push a release button and manual rewind the film into the cassette, before opening the back of the camera.

Needles to say I was not sober. The mistake I made was that I misjudged the amount of rewinding that I had done. So I opened the back of the camera with about half of the film still wound around the winding spindle. I was a little lucky in that the country club room was fairly dark and I noticed it right away as I opened the camera back. I quickly shut it and finished rewinding the film.

I felt guilty as hell for about a week, until the photos came back. There were only two photos that were unusable and three that were "fogged" some but printable. Fortunately this photo mistake involved snapshots at the reception and not the posed formal portraits or the photos taken during the ceremony.

The bride and groom have laid back personalities and were not mad at all.