Took me 4 hours to figure out why my first roll of Portra 400 came back blank

Noah Barnes · 2026-10-07T03:30:02.773613+00:00

I shot a whole roll of Portra 400 at Gas Works Park last month and dropped it off at a lab in Ballard, then got the scans back and every single frame was clear as glass. I spent almost 4 hours checking the shutter speeds on my Pentax K1000, re-reading the manual, and even watching YouTube videos on metering before I finally popped the lens off and saw the film was never actually threaded onto the take-up spool. The whole time I thought my camera was busted and I was about to price out a CLA, but it was just me loading it wrong on a park bench in a hurry. Has anyone else wasted a whole afternoon on a problem that turned out to be one dumb mistake at the very start?

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Took me 4 hours to figure out why my first roll of Portra 400 came back blank | Analog Camera Club - Topic Shares