What happens if you rewind film

Time to rewind. Some film frame counters and a number of medium format cameras work in reverse by starting at 24 or 36, depending on what you loaded, and work their way down to 1, letting you know how many exposures are left before the film is used up. If the film counter shows 0, rewind.

With that accomplished, you must now physically rewind the film. There is usually a crank located immediately above the location of the film cartridge where it lies inside the camera for this purpose. You may have to pull up and unfold a hinged rewind knob on the crank, and turn it in the correct direction usually indicated by an arrow with a constant, gentle pressure until you feel an increased tension.

This greater tension means you are near the end and about to disconnect the leader from the take-up spool. Give it another turn or two and there will usually be a sudden relaxation of tension, which tells you the film has just disconnected from the take-up spool.

Some photographers stop rewinding here and open the camera back because they know they have loaded all the exposed film into the cartridge and the leader is all that remains to be rewound. They do this in order not to have to retrieve the leader from inside the cartridge later when they are about to process the film.

However, this is fraught with risk for the average photographer. You may confuse the exposed roll for an unexposed roll because its leader is showing, and accidentally load it again in your camera, resulting in a whole bunch of disappointing [but perhaps interesting] unwanted double-exposures. Better to rewind the film completely so that you cannot accidentally re-load the same roll later.

Give the crank a few more turns until no tension at all can be felt and the crank turns loosely. Now the film has completely rewound and is spinning around inside the film cartridge. It is not a good idea to keep turning the crank in case a tiny bit of grit got into the cartridge. It could be scratching the film as you turn it around. Usually the correct rewind direction is indicated by a curved arrow. The point is, slightly opening the film case precisely where the film comes out, I used a non-sharp knife the kind used for eating, not for cooking , then spin the spindle back and forth.

Listen carefully to know when the film lead passes the opening it makes a subtle clicking noise when you spin it in the winding direction , in this point start spinning it in unwinding direction. Just be careful not to open the case too much, so when you're done, press with your fingers to close it again. In My case, I had taken some shots with a film "point an shoot" but I remembered how many, so I took again, the same amount of shots but inside a dark backpack in the darkened room, plus one, And then continued shooting normally.

Result: Somehow I ended shooting 38 exposures out from a 36 exposures film roll, wasting half a frame due to the extra dark shoot Otherwise the shoots before and after this gap would have been half overlapped. If you don't want to buy a film leader extractor, you can unwind the film using sticky paper as described here. You can also use the film leader from another canister, as shown in this video.

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Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. How do I unwind a roll of film? Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 5 months ago. Active 2 years, 10 months ago. Viewed 71k times. Is there a way to unwind the film slightly, so that I could still use that film?

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