I ruined the film.

(more on that later)

Yesterday, we went to see the Toronto Blue Jays play the Baltimore Orioles at the SkyDome.

We hadn’t attended a game all season and for weeks had been saving the last-weekend-before-going-back-to-school surprise for our kids.

It was a hot, hot, hot day.  We had no shade.  We melted.

The Jays won – yay!

During the eighth inning, a pop-up fly ball off the bat of my son’s favourite player (Troy Tulowitzki) was hit our way.

I warned my youngest daughter beside me that it was coming at us quickly and then, at the last second, instinct took over and I stood up to catch it with my bare hand.

When I realized what I had done I shouted like a caveman.

After receiving celebratory high-fives from the friendly crowd around me, I turned to face my family so that I could triumphantly hand over the ball to my ecstatic kids, but instead I was greeted with tears.

It turns out that a rather large gentleman who had not moved all game — and who was separated from me by the seats occupied by the rest of my family — had at some point developed the curious notion that he had a chance at getting the same pop-up ball that now lay in my hands …by diving across my family for it.

He ended up on the pavement of course, but not before “body-slamming” (my wife’s description) my kids.

To his credit, he apologized.

However, the remaining last inning was spent consoling my eldest daughter who had taken the bulk of our seat-neighbour’s considerably forceful blunt impact.

Afterwards, we laughed.

So back to the film and the images on it…

I messed up.  Twice.  Once when assembling the reel and tank and then again when I was developing.

In my fatigue and hurry last night to get the film developed and hung to dry for scanning today, I committed two rookie mistakes and lost more than half of the role.  The surviving images (those that weren’t damaged) were manipulated heavily during scanning and post-processing to get anything to show up.

I lost some potentially very nice images.

On top of it all, I was testing Undisclosed Lens #3, so I sort-of jinxed its debut.

Enough of words!

Here are the (surviving) images from our fateful September 6, 2015:

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And now one digital image, taken this morning…

(the cause of all the craziness yesterday)

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There was even more craziness on the way home, but those images appear to be totally lost.

I’ll see if I can save any of them, but as you can tell the image quality was progressively deteriorating towards the end of the roll.

—Peter.