Fed 3 (Black) – Fuji Superia 400

 Industar-61( И-61/ЛД) 53mm f/2.8

This is the black and silver camera body I bought to replace the pink and duct tape one, not because I don’t enjoy the pink look but more for the sake of subtlety (plus the duct tape began peeling). After I developed this roll, I was scratching my head about why there were these hairy vertical light leaks on certain photos. As I mentioned with the Fed 3 (Pink) roll, I hadn’t properly rewound that film and exposed a good chunk of it, causing lots of light leaks. But this was a different roll, in a different body, but using the same lens… could the light leaks have been caused by the lens in both instances? That seemed crazy, and after I bought an adapter to mount the lens on my mirrorless digital camera I confirmed that there was nothing wrong with the lens.

Here’s what I think happened: Once the film had been fully rewound back into the canister, I needed a way to get the film back out and onto a developing spool. I bought a tool that slides into the canister’s opening in order to pull that film leader back out so it can be started on a the spool. It worked really well on all that Kodak Ultramax I had been shooting, but it struggled on the more tightly packed 36 exposure rolls like this Fuji and some Portra rolls. In the end it was never able to pull out the film leader, however many times I tried. And I tried a lot of times, which is what I think ended up causing the light leaks seen here. I can’t 100% confirm this was the culprit, and this light leak doesn’t appear on the Portra rolls I mentioned having the same troubles with, but maybe Kodak just uses a tighter seal on their canisters compared to Fuji? Who knows.

I shot another roll to confirm that this camera wasn’t the source of the problem, however I ended up completely losing the roll (along with a roll on a Fuji Half camera) due to a developing error (or maybe exhaustion of the developer due to time and use, also not sure about that). At the time of writing this I’m putting my third roll of film through the Fed 3, hoping to finally verify that it is working as it should.🤞

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