Black and White protraits of strangers Research

After my flop in the back room I decided to attempt it again and as it was raining out side we decided inside at a very interesting spot in the collage.  So after setting up I proceeded to take 6 photos of people one with flash on and one with flash off. I had to set the camera up for every shot as I needed one with the background blurred, one semi focused in the back ground and one totally focused in the background. After I was finished doing that I went back up to the developing room and as I was loading mine and Nicolas film in a tank I felt one of the pegs with the film attached fall into one of the tanks. When we finally found it , it had fallen into the stop tank and ruined it. We proceeded to develop what was left wondering what film we had just destroyed after 30 more minutes in the darkest room imaginably we emerged with our developed prints except for the one we dropped in the stop which turned out to be Nicolas. After inspecting the film I discovered my subjects where stood to close to the back ground and there was no depth of field....NOOOOOOOO id messed up again did I mention I really don't like this 5x4 camera. Again im going to have to try again and that is with out doing the colour film yet.