Extracting the Film Leader

As some of you may already know, Jason and I just ventured back into film. And after such a long long hiatus from film, and to cut the story short, I accidentally rewound the film all the way into the canister, including the film leader :S



I did not want to waste a perfectly good and unused roll of film. But to use it again, I would need to get the film leader out for me to reload it again. So .. how?

First, you use an old negative film strip, or.. in my case, I do not have any old film strip with me, so I use one of those transparent covers which we use as the coverpage when binding documents. I cut out a strip roughly the size of a film negative, stuck on double sided tape on it and carefully insert it into the ‘mouth’ of the canister.



(sorry for the blurry photo… a bit excited hahaha..)

Then you twist the “film canister handle” anti-clockwise until the film inside the canister catches the double-sided tape. You continue twisting until you get a good amount of grip and the transparent sheet and tape starts to go into the canister. Then than all you have to do is to carefully pull out the transparent sheet and…



… TAAA DAAA!!!! Out comes the film leader… all set to be reloaded into the camera.

It’s quite easy… a lot easier than I thought it would be. So dun go wasting that accidentally rewound film :)

Will update blog on some film photos soon.