There are vertical white streaks on the length of the upper left corner of the NEGATIVE. In the prints, they appear as BLACK streaks.

It appears ONLY on SUNNY DAYS where the sky is involved. Indoors r fine. I have tried several films and I get these problems quite randomly.

I suspect it is a curtain leak, but then the streaks should be WHITE and not BLACK on prints, if thats the case. Im confused. The curtains looks fine when i look thru it against a light source. No leaks.

I have no idead what it is now. I have black taped the back of the camera but it still did not help. I have black marked the chrome linings of the lens exteding into the film space to avoid reflection of light, but it didn't help..

My last resort is to change the shutter curtain.

Its fustrating to not find out the cause of this. My fauth in the older leicas and their reliability is dwindling.

I avoid sunny day scenes now...life goes on.

-- Travis koh (teckyy@hotmail.com), March 26, 2002

Answers

Maybe dust speckles on the lens. With a wide-angle lens on a sunny day (= closed aperture), marks on the front or rear surface of the lens may become visible as dark spots on the finished print.

Other suggestion: a hair (or something else) in the shutter, which makes a shadow on the negative when the shutter is opened.

Anyway, if it's always on the same position and if it's dark on the final print, it should be something in the light path of the camera. The more DOF you have, the better it becomes visible.

Regards

Georg

-- Georg Kern (georg.kern@uibk.ac.at), March 26, 2002.

It sounds like a shutter problem.
I'm guessing that the sunny outdoor shots were taken at a higher speed than the indoor ones. In which case it could be due to the shutter curtains closing or narrowing before the first curtain has run the full width of the negative. This will give unexposed sections on one side of the frame, and can be caused by the spring tension of the blinds being out of balance, which is a fairly cheap and easy thing to fix, or it could be caused by one of the tapes coming unstuck from the shutter blinds. The latter problem is a lot more expensive to fix. It causes one of the shutter blinds to lean to the top or bottom, instead of running true. If your shutter looks a bit wrinkled when it's closed but not tensioned, then this would be another strong indicator that the shutter's in need of attention.

-- Pete Andrews (p.l.andrews@bham.ac.uk), March 26, 2002.