Took me 5 years to realize I was loading film backwards

I shot 20 rolls of Tri-X over five years and always blamed my old Canon for the thin negatives. Turns out I was putting the film cartridge in upside down, pulling the leader the wrong way across the gate. A friend at a camera meetup in Des Moines pointed it out after watching me load one roll. I felt like a fool, but honestly that small fix changed everything about my contact sheets. Has anyone else had a basic loading habit bite them for that long?

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robinwalker10d ago

That Des Moines story hits close to home. For years I loaded my 120 film backwards on the take-up spool, always thinking the paper was too tight. I swore it was a defective batch from the lab. It took a random YouTube video from a guy in Ohio showing the paper arrow direction for me to finally see my mistake. Changing that one habit made my negatives look like they came from a different camera entirely. It is wild how our brains lock into a wrong routine and just refuse to question it, even when the proof is right in front of us.