John Bartley said:

I put in the film holder, pulled out the dark
slide, snapped the picture and went to put the dark slide back in - NO
GO!! Aaarrrg!

You presumably loaded the film in the rails upon which the dark slide moves
up and down rather than below those rails which is where the film is
supposed to go. This used to happen to me all the time because it's very
easy to do and is extremely frustrating. Fortunately there is an easy way to
prevent it.

In daylight pull the darkslide of an empty holder up a couple inches. Look
at the interior of the holder, at the base where the flap is. It will be
very obvious that there are rails upon which the darkslide slides up and
down and that the film is supposed to go under the bottom of the two rails.
The bottom rail on each side of the holder has a sharp corner (at least all
of mine do, some new, some ancient). When you're actually loading film,
after you've got the film in the holder just rub your finger in the area
where those two corners are located and see if you can feel the corners with
your finger. If you can then the film is loaded properly. If you can't what
you will feel instead is the film resting on top of the corner. If that's
the case then you have the film in the dark slide rails and you need to
remove it and start over (no, touching the film with your finger won't
create a smudge or otherwise hurt the film). This is one of those things
that takes five minutes to describe in writing and maybe five seconds max to
actually do but hopefully this is clear.

Of course you could also pull the dark slide out of the holder entirely and
then see if it will go back in after you've loaded the film but that's an
unnecessary pain to do in the dark and gets to be time consuming if you're
loading many sheets of film

"John Bartley" wrote in message
...
Well, you've seen the post with a link to my first photo, which was very
much out of focus and (I think) overexposed. This evening, I had almost
exactly the same conditions as far as weather and light and clouds etc,
so out I went with my camera, spent about 20 minutes working with the
focus, tilt and swing. I even wore my glasses, and used a magnifier to
see the ground glass. When I was done, you could read the license plate
numbers on the trucks!!! I put in the film holder, pulled out the dark
slide, snapped the picture and went to put the dark slide back in - NO
GO!! Aaarrrg! I'm going to try removing the dark slide (from as far as
it went back in) and removing the negative in the dark room this evening
and then I'm going to develop it, but I'm preparing myself for major
disappointment :-( . I guess I'll have to be more careful how I load the
holder, although I can't understand how I got the dark slide into the
holder in the first place when I was loading.

:'(

--
regards from ::

John Bartley
43 Norway Spruce Street
Stittsville, Ontario
Canada, K2S1P5

( If you slow down it takes longer
- does that apply to life also?)