Setback - could not get this Baby to work

I tried to load a roll of film into my Rolleiflex Black Baby. I failed. There was a silver lining, though. The coffee and scone from Analog Coffee were good.

I’ve done a little research on this Rolleiflex. According to what I’ve read, it’s called the Black Baby for a couple of reasons. It’s a 4×4 square image cousin of the popular Rolleiflex 6×6. There is also a grey version. It uses 127 film. (Here’s a link to a Wikipedia entry.)

Last week in Portland I picked up some 127 film from Blue Moon Camera. It’s not cheap, which makes today’s failure a bit more painful. I found a couple of videos on loading Rolleis. I couldn’t find a Rollei that perfectly matched up with this one, but I thought I’d be able to sort it out.

I thought I’d loaded the film correctly. After rolling the film by hand to where the arrow on the film backing was showing, I closed the camera and started turning the crank.

That’s probably where I went wrong. I’m not sure that’s how you advance the film to the first exposure. I kept cranking and cranking. I hoped it would stop automatically, but after what seemed like too many cranks, I suspected that I’d just shifted the film from the film spool to the uptake spool. I was right.

I have two more rolls of film. A friend of mine has a Grey Baby. When he gets back into town I’ll see if he can show me how to load this thing. I’m looking forward to shooting with it.