My film camera shutter speeds were off for 2 years, a light leak on a trip to Portland tipped me off

I've been shooting with this old Pentax K1000 for like 2 years, and I always thought the photos looked a bit soft or dark in certain lighting, but I figured it was just me or the film. Last month I took a roll up to Portland and got back scans where the top corner had this weird orange streak on every single frame. I finally took the lens off and noticed the shutter curtain was hanging up slightly, so my speeds were way slower than what the dial said. It never crossed my mind to actually test the shutter with a slow motion phone video until that moment. Has anyone else found a dumb simple way to check your camera's timing without dropping cash on a shutter tester?

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piperr5812d ago

Did you ever check the light seals on that K1000 while you had the lens off? I had a similar moment with an old Minolta where the back foam turned to sticky goo and I thought my exposure was fine, but every roll came back with a weird pink stripe down one side. I ended up using a friend's DSLR to photograph the shutter at different speeds, then counted the frames in slow motion on my laptop. It worked well enough to find that my 1/500 was actually 1/60, but then I spent the whole weekend making new foam seals out of a craft store sheet. That was a rabbit hole, but the camera worked like a charm after that.