A Blanket Of Snow To Let You Know

…that winter is most certainly on its way.

As forecast, on Sunday, we ended up with about 15cm (6″) of snow. Also as forecast, I made sure to get outside and make a few photos of the season’s first real snow.

The sidewalks around Centretown were only so-so, but navigable with the grey low-heel booties I have (Joan of Arctics arrive today), and I did see plenty of snow removal happening. That first snow almost seems to inspire removal crews in the same way it does me to make photos!

Since it was not cold exactly at -2℃ or -3℃ (~27℉), the snow was fairly heavy and caused many of the area’s more stubborn trees to lose their leaves. Big piles of green and yellow leaves fell to the ground around them on top of the snow, which you can see in the fourth photo above.

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It would not be a planned photo walk if I didn’t have a lesson.

For all of the things I like about the F80, as a hobbyist or consumer camera, Nikon chose not to include a feature that can be quite handy: leaving a small portion of the leader out on rewind.

As someone who develops film in her kitchen, it is very convenient to just leave a small length of film out after rewinding so make it easier to cut the end for loading on to a reel. It saves me from faffing about with a retriever (surprisingly unreliable and breakable) or opening the canister in the dark like an otter eating a shellfish (can be sharp, requires more scissors in the dark).

With manual wind cameras, it is easy to leave some out, and with some other modern cameras, like the Canon EOS Elan II, there is an option to leave a bit of it out. No such luck with the F80 though.

To get around this, when I finish the roll and the camera begins to rewind, when the counter gets to frame 0, I quickly open the back door, which stops the motor.

When I do this at home, I just remove the roll and set it aside. When I do this on the street, however, it turns out that I just leave the camera on and close the door again.

Since the leader was still attached to the take-up, thinking it’s a new roll, it proceeded to load it again. Thanks to the street noise (amplified by the wet roads), I did not hear this. So when I arrived somewhere warmer, I proceeded to remove the film only to see that a whole lot of the roll was wound and now exposed to light.

It could have been much worse: of the 25 photos on the roll, I lost six.

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