Was it a mistake or a chance to learn?

While working with film, I've had a few mishaps. But a wise man once said that a mistake is only a mistake if you don't learn from it. I thought I was being very careful when I cut my film in total darkness and fed it into the reel, but somehow I cut the first picture in half, as seen in this contact sheet. 

The frame is supposed to show Pac-Man surrounded by ghosts. Someone created this with thumb tacks and I wanted to get a picture of it. 

To avoid making the same mistake twice, I needed to know how much film there is between the end of the roll and the first picture. Some cameras expose starting near the leader while others unspool the entire film and expose starting at the end. Those cameras feed the film back into the canister frame by frame. 

Therefore, I shot another roll of film and opened the canister in darkness and unwound the entire film onto my fingers then I ripped it from the spool. Next, I fed that end into the reel. This was to ensure I hadn't cut away any film, only the notch at the end would be missing. It would also ensure that the film fed properly into the reel. I wondered if an uncut leader would feed properly into the reel. The ball bearings would only have film to grab on one side of the leader, as seen in the photo below.

Now that I look back on the situation, I could have fed the leader past both bearings and it would have grabbed. However, I didn't think of it at the time. Instead, I was just thinking that I shouldn't cut the film anywhere so that I could examine its full lenght after development. 

After developing the film, I could see that there isn't much room between the spool and the first frame, roughly an inch to an inch and a half. That means I'll have to be careful with future cuts.

 

Another learning opportunity arose when I had a lapse in judgement. This time, I was using my Canon A-1, which has manual rewind. For some reason, I thought it would be best not to rewind the film all the way because I wouldn't need to fish the leader out of the canister. Now, I can see that this didn't make sense because the roll was finished. I'd be opening the canister and that would give me easy access to the leader. For some reason, I got confused with the situation where a person rewinds a film when it isn't entirely exposed and plans to shoot the remaining frames later. As I was rewinding, I heard the film was almost ready to release from the camera's spool so I opened the back. Unfortunately, the film wasn't as close to releasing as I thought. Roughly three frames were exposed to the light. I closed the camera and rewound the rest of the film and paid attention to what that sounds like. Then, I opened the back, removed the film and developed it. Sure enough, some frames were missing. 

The first frame was exposed to the light and so was half of the second frame. But that's ok. Now I know what to listen for when rewinding film and I'll be sure to rewind it all the way. Besides, I can always go back and do retakes of the Pac-Man picture and of the one above, which I did. If I hadn't had these learning opportunities, I wouldn't know as much as I do now.