What was your most embarrassing photography moment? Well mine goes far back a number of years to when I first really became interested in photography and started to use 35mm SLR cameras, whilst serving in the Army.
I had finished a short course at Ashford in Kent, and I had just returned to my unit's barracks in Colchester, Essex when I was told the unit PRO wanted me to take photographs of a very well-known celebrity who was visiting the barracks the following day (Saturday) has she was in the locality after opening a new supermarket in Stansted.
Saturday dawned and later on that morning three Fox armoured vehicles (that's a bit of a give a way to who the celebrity was) drove up to Battalion Headquarters and out stepped the celebrity with her manager and other staff.
She was only about 5 foot tall but with a very well defined chest (yes it was Samantha Fox, the famous Sun Page 3 girl). She was signing copies of her latest calendar and a horde of young soldiers posed for their photo with this sex symbol. I was busy taking photos with a Nikon camera (FM2 I think and a Metz flashgun). I loaded the camera with Ilford Pan F 50 asa film.
After all this was done and because I had a key to the unit darkroom I thought right I will get these three rolls of film developed and processed. Big mistake because this was the very first time that I had done this process and yes I made a right pig's ear of it. I had not developed the films long enough and they were as thin as hell. I went out and bought some chemicals to try and increase the depth and tone of the negatives but I ended up taking them to a local photography shop in an attempt to save my bacon.
Needless to say I was not very popular for many weeks after this incident and I attempted to keep a low profile. Since then I have made the odd error namely clicking away taking photographs to discover that I have not even loaded a film into the damn camera (now tell me you have never done that). Then once when I was doing an important shoot one of my camera's locked up on me. I had a spare body and rolls of film so that was a potential disaster averted.
Then of course there have been times when I wish I had done something which I had not such as take and use my Metz flashgun to Normandy with me when taking photos of the Normandy Veterans (using fill-in-flash outdoors). But available light did the trick. Hindsight is a wonderful thing is it not.
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