I have become something of a Second Hand Rose of late, and one of my recent acquisitions was a camera I bought via ebay. The seller told me that she had decided that SLR photography wasn't for her after all, and she was replacing the camera I bought with a point and shoot model. She had made this decision after running only about three or four films through the camera, so it arrived looking as new.
I put a roll of slide film in it when I went on the camera club outing to The Tower Bridge Experience and St Katharine Docks, and I completed that roll and loaded up with a second one. I got the first roll processed and noticed that I seemed to have a little mark on the edge of some of my slides, but put it down to dust and just edited it off in my computer when I had scanned the ones that I thought were worth viewing.
I finished the second roll of film on a camera club outing a couple of weeks ago, and also ran a third roll through the camera. When I got those slides back, I discovered that the exact same mark (a bit like the tail of a comma) was adorning the exact same spot on every frame from those two rolls of film, which convinced me that it wasn't dust on the film after all.
It was also very annoying that it had happened when I was using slide film, as I will only be able to project those slides where I can successfully mask that edge without losing important elements of the picture. There's probably a moral here along the lines of using print film until I'm sure of a camera!
I know that the mirror in an SLR allows you to view the image the right side up through the viewfinder, but that when the mirror flips up and the film is exposed, what's at the top ends up at the bottom and vice versa, so I started on a detective trail, first of all figuring out that because the mark was in the sky that what was causing it was probably at the bottom of the camera. I then considered whether it was on the fixed parts of the camera or on the shutter curtain. As it happened, I'd taken most of the slides on these three rolls of film with a tripod and I'd used slow shutter speeds, so I went back through the slides looking for anything I may have taken hand held at a faster shutter speed, as I was interested in whether my punctuation looked the same or whether I got a blur as the shutter travelled, which could indicate that the foreign body was on the shutter curtains. Fortunately, even at high speeds, the mark remained constant, so I was satisfied that it was on the fixed parts of the camera, so I examined those more closely and found a couple of really minute pieces of hair adhering to the inner parts of the camera body.
A piece of sellotape was gently dabbed over the minute hairs I'd identified, and when the sellotape was removed, the hairs came with it.
I'm reasonably confident that I've solved my punctuation problem!
Helen
Last Revised: 25th May, 2003.