EOS Rebel K2 How to recover from accidental midroll rewind

[Bones091ish]

If I accidentally rewind the film is it over with no going back? Or is there a way to put the film back in and finish the other half of the roll? Any help is greatly appreciated? I have a rebel k2 eos. Thanks

[kvbarkley]

Only APS (Sigh, How I miss APS) would allow you to recover mid roll. Since the leader is sucked up into the cartridge, there is no way to reinsert the roll.

You could take the roll out, go into a *dark* room, pull the cover off, retrieve the leader, put the cover back on, put the film in the camera *with the lens cap* and shoot the number of frames until you get to the first empty frame, but it seems too much work to me.

[AtticusLake]

More or less, what he said.  However, I have done this.  Actually, as I recall, back in the day (before digital cameras) it wasn't seen as such a strange thing to do.

Basically, you use a film leader retriever (you can get them online for a few quid) to pull the film leader out of the cartridge.  Then, as kvbarkley said, load the film back into the camera and carefully and with the camera totally blacked out, shoot the right number of shots to get back to where you were.  You might need to give some margin for error.  But if you do it right, you don't need a dark room.  Good luck.

And yes, you might be better off just buying another roll of film.

[justadude]

As both of my collegues just mentioned, it can be done, but I'll add how easy it really is.  The trickiest part is getting the lead back out of the canister... not difficult in the least, just tricky.  It might take three or four tries to get it out.  You simply have to listen very close for the "click" when using the film lead retriever, and once you hear it know that this is the part that might have to be done a few times until the film actually catches.  This takes less than a minute, and with the price of film, is well worth one minute of your time.

Like AtticusLake mention, it does NOT have to be done in a dark room when you take the film out, retrieve the lead, and reload the film.  Just don't do it in bright light.  You will only be pulling the leading edge out, same as when you first loaded the film.  

However when you put the lens cap back on, and shoot the number of frames you had, keep in mind that some caps are not completely light tight, so I always do this in a semi-dark area (I open a closet door, hold the camera towards the back, and fire away).

It really is a common thing to do. I'll occasionally take a half finished roll out of one camera, and pop it into a different one.  Or for double exposure photography, I'll shoot a full roll, rewind, pull the lead out, reload the film, and shoot the second exposure.  I also have friends who shoot the first exposure through the whole roll, rewind, trade rolls with someone else, then shoot the double on top of the other person's roll - which leads to some very cool double exposure shots. 

Anyway, don't waste your film.  It's ridiculously easy to get the roll back to where it was mid-roll.  Just be sure to add one extra blank shot to be safe.