Weird Problem with Bessa R3a

[loganvillejc]

Last week I bought a Bessa R3a body. I ordered the body without a lens because I was undecided as to what lens I wanted to use on this camera. While waiting for the body, I rented a 35mm Summicron. When the camera arrived I shot a couple of rolls of film, one roll of Portra 160 and a roll of Fuji Press 400. I had the film processed and scanned at two different places. When I got my negatives and CD’s back, I noticed a weird smear in the top left hand corner of 6 frames out of 56 on the two different rolls. At first I thought it was a processing error but then I noticed that there were a couple of frames on each roll. You can see the smears as dark streaks in the sky in the two frames attached. You can also see that these areas are on the negatives themselves, not just the scans. It doesn’t look like flare and I would think a light leak would show up as a lighter not a darker streak. The only thing these pictures have in common that is unlike the frames without the streaks is that they were shot at f11 or f16. Everything else on the rolls was
shot at f8 or below. Anybody got an idea what this might be?

 

[Sparrow]

Can’t see how it could be either camera or lens; however there seems to be a lot of difference in illumination from the centre to the corners is the lens and any filters clean and undamaged?
PS welcome to the forum

 

[loganvillejc]

There wasn't a filter on the lens. The lens appeared to be clean but being a rental, I'd never used it on another camera.

 

[Sparrow]

yes, looks like the lab's fault, then

 

[Bertram2]

Neither camera nor lens. In this case ALL frames would be affected.

 

[Flyfisher Tom]

I can't believe my eyes ! Welcome back Bertram, we've missed your insights 🙂

 

[Dougg]

And probably not the lab either, as the scanned results were the same from different labs. A mystery... maybe just the same UFO running circles around that housing area? Hey, Bertram, good to "see" you! 🙂

 

[ZeissFan]

I would check the negatives. This looks like it could be a human hair that might be stuck between the shutter blades but is sitting away from the film plane. It looks like it's casting a shadow so it looks like it might be sitting maybe 1/4-inch from the shutter.

I'd remove the lens and carefully check the shutter box, front and back. The fire the shutter a couple of times on 1/30 and also on B and see if you see any debris in there.

But first, I'd inspect the negatives or have the offending frames rescanned, if possible.

I recently got some kind of debris stuck in the film chamber, and it put a nasty scratch through about 30 frames across two rolls of film before disappearing.

 

[clintock]

Have you ever seen "The Omen" starring Gregory Peck? Be on the lookout for glass delivery trucks with faulty parking brakes.