Hey you all,
I bought a nice camera a few days ago. I am on my third roll already. The fisrt ones were a disaster - all the images burnt out. I am not sure of what am I doing wrong. I have a Diana F+ camera, and I am shooting on 120 film. The first roll is completly blank, and the second one had only 5 savable pictures. What could it be?
Sounds overexposed. What kind of apertures and exposure settings are you using?
The Wikipedia page for the Diana camera says, “Diana cameras are predisposed to light leaks onto the exposed film.”
I have absolutely no experience with this type of camera, but frankly the Wikipedia article makes it sound like a piece of junk.
I was using it on the “partialy cloudy” exposure… guess it could be the problem. Could it be that the guys at the sjop messed up my film as well?
I think it’s unlikely. What ISO are you using? When you say “five saveable pictures” you mean they’re just overexposed?
Have you ever handled a film camera that needed manual loading before? 35mm barely counts since it uses a cartridge. I haven’t loaded roll film in 40 years but if you aren’t extremely careful to do it in the dimmest light you can manage - preferably the dark - you will flash-expose all or most of the roll.
Since this is a hardware question, moved Cafe Society --> IMHO.
Do you mean the negatives are completely blank, or the prints?
You don’t need to do 120 in the dark or even dim lighting. It’s got some kind of opaque backing on it and it’s fine for daylight loading. I wouldn’t necessarily do it in the blazing midday sun, but I’ve loaded it “in the field” without any issues. I’ve never taken any precautionary steps and never noticed any light leakage problems.
Anyhow, I’m curious to hear more about the problem. What do the negatives themselves look like? You can tell by looking at the negative itself whether light exposure is the problem, as the film will be exposed to the edges and across frame boundaries, rather than getting a black square/rectangle of overexposure in the frame, within the boundaries.
I’ve never used a Diana, but it seems to be similar to the Holga. The Holga is well-known for its light leaks, and that’s part of its charm (some photographers actually have hacks to get more light leak artificats in your picture.) However, the leaks are not such that the entire roll of film becomes overexposed.
So, OP, can you tell us what the negative looks like? Is it blank as in a clear roll of film? Then everything is underexposed or there has been no exposure on the film. If you can see the manufacturer and frame numbers along the edges of the film and everything else looks relatively blank, there has been no exposure.
Or…is the film completely black/dark all the way through? You can’t even make out the stuff printed on the edges or the boundaries between the frames where the photograph would have been exposed? In that case, your entire roll of film was somehow exposed to light before development.
Or…can you read the text on the frames and you just have a roll of black squares or rectangles on your negative, with obvious frame boundaries? In that case, you just overexposed your image by many stops.
The above is assuming the use of negative film. Positive/transparency/chrome film would be inverted.
Silly, brief hijack: So I click on the IMHO bookmark and flick my finger to start scrolling down the threads on my iPad. As the threads blur past, I read “Having trouble with my enema”
bwah?
I jab my finger down and relocate the thread…read a bit harder…
Carry on.
Nor did I, barring perhaps a few mistakes. (I started with a 120 camera at about age 10 and won’t claim I was any wizard with it.) It sounds like you’ve done it once or twice as well. The OP sounds like they might be new to the concept of both film and film that doesn’t come in a sealed canster; I could see mishandling the roll or doing it in overly bright circumstances causing the reported problems.
Yeah, we just won’t know until the OP comes back and answers our questions. Hint hint, OP!. 
No, the five savable pictures are the only ones that have an ok exposure. I will get them tomorrow.
The negatives. The guy at the shop told me it would even be a waste of money trying to print it.
I will also post a picture of the negative tomorrow. All I got was a brown-ish stripe of plastic. I will see if I can read any text on it.
Thank you guys! 
In that case, you’re not getting enough light, as pulykamell said. Without knowing more like exposure settings, ASA/ISO of the film, etc., it’s hard to tell why.
Did you take the lens cap off? (sorry, in the interest of starting with the simplest solution, it had to be asked) It looks like it’s a rangefinder so you wouldn’t know it was still on just by looking through the viewfinder.
Yes, the lens cap were off :3. It could be that I under-exposed the pictures… I think what I should do is buying another roll of film and doing many different exposures of the same scenes to see how they react…
Well writ, Pulykamell. The issue of “edge flashing” was pandemic with Holgas and to some extent with other daylight spool loaded cameras. This was not limited to still cameras either. The 100 foot “daylight spool” loads of 16mm film commonly used in Bolex or Arriflex M or S cameras were also prone to flashing along the edge of the film if one were dim ( heh ) enough to load/ unload the camera in direct sunlight and were to pull the spool too firmly when disengaging.
I’m curious to see the negatives too. “All brown” makes me think they are color negatives not black and white, and are 100% exposed. They’d be clear but brown-colored, the prints would be black or very darkly blackened. Is this the case? Even before you scan them in for us, can you articulate what a print looks like a bit better?
The way to find out if your lab is wrecking the rolls is to waste a bit of money. Take a brand new roll of 120 film tear off the tape, then send it to the lab. Don’t shoot anything on it. The negative should be properly developed, and the photographs will come back completely white. ( Solid negative equals total absence of light equals white prints. Clear negative film base with no emulsion left on the film due to exposure would equal completely black prints. )
A moment of wistful remembrance. When I was teaching the Steadicam Workshop in the early 1990’s at the ( much-beloved and mourned ) International Photographic Workshops in Rockport, Maine, the school store got in a shipment of Holga cameras. Now, at the time this puppy was something like 9.95 for the body. Seriously. I and a few other medium format afficionados were ballistic with glee. A ten DOLLAR camera that shot 120?? Who knew? I got one and a pile of film. It was good for a lot of laughs from the 35mm movie film camera body snobs in the class that my dear pal and co-instructor Kenn and I would run around screaming, " Where's my Helga !?? I must shoot this moment " while surrounded by a cool 3/4 Million in Steadicams and film cameras. Rue the day I lost that body.
Indeed, they were infamous for light leaking. I know that rather than embracing that aesthetic ( which was of course utterly unpredictable ), we’d do the right thing and load in very subdued light, and use black paper tape to seal the seams up. Still, the lens was a piece of crap disk of plastic and man, the atrocities of optical impurity did indeed yield some beautiful results. Some were VERY 1880’s in appearance… Miss that camera. If one is curious about what these shots look like, go to Google Images and type in " Holga images " and hit enter. A long page of Holga shots appears.
I know of the Lomography store and movement and am sorely tempted to get a Holga again. Their Spinner 360 is an absolute delight to use.
Please do share a few of these images. We will help you figure out what’s wrong and try to guide you towards enjoying your Diana !
ETA: Oh ! One detail may help you here. I seem to remember that the Holga has you load the 120 roll of film sheathed in its paper light-proof backing, and as soon as the take-up spool has engaged, you close the back up and shoot. Yes? When you are shot out, you use the mechanism to release the gearing and re-wind the film back onto the roll, or do you take it out once it is shot and remove the take-up side? Perhaps you’re opening the door inadvertently or the door isn’t latching properly and as you handle the body, light is flooding the film. Having to re-wind exposed film back onto the original feed side spool would cause more light leaks onto the film, if you are indeed suffering a badly locking back panel. Do you rewind after each roll, or just wind FORWARD until you hear the paper end flapping, then open up and remove the finished roll?
One more thing, perhaps you missed it in post #5:
What ISO film were you using? And what lighting conditions were you in? Was it outside & sunny? Outside and dark in the evening? Indoors? And the photos that you were able to salvage, what conditions were they taken in? What do they look like on the negative? Is the negative light and you can just make out the image you were able to salvage or is the negative very dark, and you need to look through it through a strong light to make out the image well?
I think you have that inverted. An unexposed roll of negative film should come back completely clear (or clear as possible.) A flashed roll of negative film should come back very dark. Underexposed (or underdecelopved) negs are often called “thin” negs and require very little exposure time in the printing to print for this reason, and overexposed (or overdeveloped) ones are called “thick” for the same reason (and sometimes even require–shit, I can’t remember the name of the chemical, but there was one that you can use to thin out your negatives.)
It’s positive/transparency/chrome film that will come back black if unexposed.
To clarify, and with advance apologies to the OP if I am misstating anything - the Diana is a very simple camera with few settings. It has one shutter speed (plus B) and four apertures. If the OP is not an experienced photographer, or has experience only with modern, highly automated cameras, trying to get properly-exposed images is going to be a, well, trying experience. It’s back to the pre-electronic era of gauging film ISO, lighting conditions and selecting an aperture that will give proper exposure with a 1/60 shutter speed - which may not be possible given the combination of ISO and light. Too fast a film in bright daylight and even the smallest aperture may be overexposed; too slow a film in dimmer light and only a long B exposure will do.
The OP needs to be firmly grounded in the basics all photographers should know but, in these days of $50-5000 point and shoots, probably don’t.
The Diana is a very specialized niche camera and not one for an amateur unless they are willing to learn all those hard old rules and methods. Starting with using an exposure meter until your eye is trained enough to make judgments about exposure without one. Perhaps you can borrow a meter for a few photo sessions?