Like finding out that the motor drive for your 35mm camera is smart enough to leave the film leader out when rewinding a roll of film. I’m not sure how I got to roll 15 without realizing that, except that I’d just recently started shooting with the heavy motor unit attached.

This is handy if you need to switch mid-roll as I did a couple of weekends ago or if you’re planning to develop at home (no need to pop open the film canister, just leave the leader out, trim it off and feed the film onto the reel straight from the canister, you can even use the bit of  leader you trimmed to make sure your fixer is still good).

Of course for rewinding and reloading later you do need to remember what frame you’d reached. I scrawled it onto the film canister in blue sharpie – “adv.to#24” (I’d shot to 22, seems safest to leave a 1-frame gap to avoid any risk of overlapping frames). With the motor drive set to H, it took about 5 seconds to get to where I’d left off when I reloaded the fast film later on!

Incidentally, looking at the developed negatives it appears that the frame registration would have been accurate enough to not overlap frames. I might try that with a less important roll sometime, maybe when I run my first test roll of black and white soon. Then again, I’d rather lose one frame to blankness than run any risk of messing up two frames which might have been good otherwise.