21/08/2025
You know how it goes, someone shouts "fungus" and we all have a seizure, worrying about whether it will spread, and how bad your photos are going to look!!
Well, for the first issue, I suggest putting a condom over your lens just to be sure. You can never be too careful! For the second, well, yes, there may well be some degradation in image IQ, depending on the severity of course, but whether you'll see it will depend to a certain degree on how you shoot the lens.
If you shoot your lens at say f11 all the way down to f22, I'm pretty sure that you are going to see some of the dendrites on the lens in your photos. The answer, shoot wide open or anywhere down to say f8 where you'll see very little effect other than a slight loss of contrast and sharpness. Look at the photos!!
Fungus is a living organism and even when dead, it leaves remains. You could disassemble your lens, as I did, and give it a damn good clean but in certain circumstances, for example where the fungus has damaged the lens coating and previous cleaning has scarred the surface, it ain't gonna work!! That's what happened to mine. Under strong light, you can see the damage done - see first photo. It looks horrendous doesn't it😭. That was before cleaning but trust me, it looks pretty much the same after cleaning. Does this mean it's for the bin? No, I don't think so. My first thoughts are, let's go shoot it and see what affect it has on our photos!! Then we'll know 👍
So I did, and here are some of the photos that I took this morning with this lens. To test, I set the camera either on f8 (zone focussing) or on f2.8 for some of the arty close up shots. On a few others, I shot them at f22 to emphasise the effect. BTW, zone focusing is great for street when you are using a wide angle manual lens as it's set and forget, i.e. set at f8, focus on something 2 metres away and shoot all day with that setting. Everything from 2m to infinity will be sharp enough especially for street.
CONCLUSION:A bad dose of fungus will definitely reduce contrast and sharpness although nothing that can't be remedied in post. The shots here are jpegs SOOC with the mildest of editing, mostly to overcome the loss of exposure due to the haze. Believe me, it wasn't much. The lens cost me £16 on ebay. Should i send it back? Probably, but you know what, it's a sweet little lens that gives great results even though the lens are covered in haze. I probably won't. I'll write a proper article on my blog that highlights the difficulties you can expect if your lens is covered in fungus / haze and what you can do about it. For other articles, visit https://thecreativecamera.co.uk/vintage-lenses-manual-mayhem-or-nostalgia-on-steroids
