popitz said:
The lens however, has some fungus inside 🙁. Is there anything I should take care of when dismantling it for cleaning?
1) Consider leaving it alone. Try shooting with it, see how bad it is first.
2) Don't store it with your other lenses. Yes, lenses can share fungus.
3) Sometimes bright light through a window will kill off and render somewhat transparent a case of fungus - not so much in my experience, but worth a shot.
4) The back of the lens is generally coated with a much softer coating, the inside of lenses sometimes even more so. Even very delicate cleaning can leave permanent scratches that will affect your photos more than the fungus, so be careful when gouging around in there with a q-tip.
5) If you take out more than one lens element, make a drawing of the lenses and their arrangement (like which direction they curve in) when you take them out. Quite often, they'll go back together the wrong way without a complaint. And since they are not SLR lenses, you won't know it until you see your prints and begin to curse loudly.
6) Anything that is screwed in should be screwed back in to the same depth. Make a drawing of the alignment of the rings by their slots.
7) Consider getting or making a spanner wrench. Consider it an investment, you'll be doing this again. Like cameras, you can never have too many tools.
http://www.micro-tools.com/Merchant2/spanner.htm
http://www.micro-tools.com/Merchant2/lens.htm
8) Remember that fungus lives by eating things, like everything does. And sadly, the fungus that inhabits lenses often excretes a type of mild acid. You can remove the fungus and discover that the coating underneath has been eaten away. This may or may not affect your photos in any observable way.
All dirt, scratches, coating loss, and other defects in a lens affect the images it makes. The question is always 'how much' will it be affected, and how will it be manifested? It can be as simple as a general loss of contrast, hardly something you even notice, or a tendency to have increased flare problems, or it can be huge nasty chunks of ugliness in the negative, destroying it's use as a photograph. Only you can tell what is acceptable and what is not. I've seen some photos on pnet taken with a lens you'd think had been dug out of a pile of horse manure, and the resulting photos looked fine to me. Truly amazing when I think how much I obsess over clean optics.
Best Regards,
Bill Mattocks
