canon ae1 light leak?

[fingerprints]

i've got a bit of a problem. i've got an old canon ae-1 that is my main 35mm camera. i love it, and i am very happy with it, but every once in a while i get a couple pictures that have light damage on them. most recently, i had two pictures on a roll of 24 that were damaged. the one attached was the worst photo on the roll hit, and luckily it was just a bad snapshot of the dogs playing, but sometimes it hits otherwise great pics. on this roll, the affected pictures were 6 shots apart. the other shot was faintly affected.

anybody have similar problem? i'm poor, and i don't know of a place to go that can do a camera check up for cheap or free. i'm assuming i have a light leak, but i don't know exactly where and how, so i'm curious if anybody can recognize the pattern and tell me what i need to fix. am i maybe changing lenses incorrectly? or if anybody knows someone who'll diagnose my camera illness for free in the Los Angeles area, feel free to advise.

thanks!
joel

[another view]

Looks like a light leak, all right. If you took the shot before it, advanced the camera and waited awhile and/or had the camera outside on a bright day then maybe that's why it only happened on certain frames.

If the camera has foam seals on it (not sure if it does) then you might find information on the web on how to replace them. Someone might even be selling a kit on ebay. If it doesn't have foam seals, you might be able to find a replacement back on ebay which might fix the problem. Then there's g-tape... You could tape over the edges of the back with gaffer's tape, which won't (shouldn't!) leave a residue like electrician's or duct tape. Good camera stores will have this (Holga shooters know all about this).

[JULIAN]

hey, i might have a similar problem with my old ae1.

-was your other shot right next to this one? or a few shots away on the roll?
-did the exposure pattern look identical to this one? in the same place in the frame? or was it different?

mine was a very thin stripe in exactly the same place sporadically throughout a roll (about 5 occurences in 24 exp.)

no one even at a shop has been able to give me a good answer....


JULIAN