Lens fungus - can it spread?

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Craig
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I'm posting this in here as I imagine the age of the equipment that most in here use is more likely to suffer with this.

Our loft room can get very hot and humid so I keep all my digital gear in an airtight plastic box with silica bags and a humidity meter (£400 dry cabinet, jog on). I was going to keep my film stuff in there too but didn't mix it as I had a suspicion about this. I have spotted the beginnings of some fungus in my 50mm FD lens today.

Simple question, can fungus spread if gear is kept at a close proximity?
 
Well I suppose in theory yes, but if you have used any equipment outside a sealed clean room, then all of your equipment has spores just waiting to thrive in the right conditions.
So placing film stuff along side digi stuff is not going to make much difference as said...they all have spores.
 
Thanks chaps, I'll keep it away from the others. Maybe time to upgrade to the 1.4 version :banana:
 
an fungus spread if gear is kept at a close proximity

Yes and no.

If the spores are external then without doubt, yes, they can,if given suitable conditions thrive and spread, sometimes quite rapidly to nearby objects, furniture etc

However if the spores are internal of the lens, much as there is always a risk, the likelyhood of spreading to other kit is much less.

Fungal spores are everywhere, we breath them in with every breath….they are simply a part of nature which break down organic matter.
As such, without storig kit in laboratory type conditions ( climate controlled cabinets etc) there will always be a chance of it acquiring an unwanted growth!

The easiest way to avoid being a victim is to "air" your gear regularly particularly in the sun / daylight ( sit the lenses in sunlight with caps off or better still o out and use them!), be sure to store it away dry and give it a wipe over / clean on aregular basis.
 
This is quoted from a reply regarding the same topic on another forum :



"Lenses get fungus because they have dust inside, and are stored in a humid warm environment. That's pretty much it.

However, to generate more spores, fungus needs a lot of food. A dust speck or two isn't enough. Fungus spreads by generating huge volumes of spores, in the hope that one will find another place where fungus can grow. The odds of success on any one spore are usually worse than the lottery. That takes a lot of resources to make that many spores to have any chance of one of them making it to a new food source. Any fungus growing in a lens does not have much food (a dust speck isn't much), so isn't likely to generate many spores, if it even reaches the spore-generating stage in its lifecycle.

The reason you get multiple colonies of fungus inside a single lens is because the multiple dust specks in the lens all have spores on them from an external source. Since the conditions to sprout fungus are the same for all those dust specks (humidity), you get multiple colonies of fungus. There isn't enough food inside a lens for fungus to spread from one colony to another part of a lens by itself (again, not enough food to make enough spores).

So no, one lens cannot infect another. But yes, if you store lenses somewhere and one gets fungus, you're likely to get fungus in the other lenses. Not because one lens "infects" the other, but because you've put both lenses somewhere where they are:

a) exposed to a source of spores (from outside the lenses), and
b) have provided the conditions for the fungus to grow."
 
Thanks chaps, I'll keep it away from the others. Maybe time to upgrade to the 1.4 version :banana:
That's what I did... the 50mm FD 1.8 I'd bought new with my camera in 1980 had a sticking (oily) aperture fault, so I sent it for repair last year. Fortunately, the repairer was very good and examined the lens properly before starting work on it.

He saw there was some separation/light hazing between one of the 'joined' lens elements caused by fungus (which he thought was probably now dead). I'd not noticed this, but was glad I was given the option. I put the money I'd saved on the repair towards a mint condition Canon 50mm f/1.4 FDn (the button type bayonet release, not the silver ring type), which I got for a very fair price on-line from a branch of LCE.

I think it's a really good lens, better than the f/1.8 and it doesn't half look the part mounted on my old Canon A1. :) So, as sad as it may be to lose a faithful old servant, look at this as an upgrade opportunity. ;)

As to the fungus debate; yes, fungal spores need the right conditions (including a suitable host/medium) to start growing, and fungal spores are all around us in the air (but how many of those are species that will commonly grow on camera lenses?). My thinking is that it's best not to encourage the situation, so I wouldn't knowing have a lens with fungus in my collection, apart from that old 50mm 1.8 where I think it's more than likely dead as it hasn't spread to any other camera lens I've had in the house during the last 20 years. Anyway, best of luck finding a suitable replacement.
 
Rather than getting a bespoke expensive dry cabinet, which only controls the humidity for a very small area, I find having a dehumidifier seems to help (as well as controlling damp and condensation in the whole house).
 
In between almost giving up film photography and respraying myself as a digital photographer I kept my lenses on a shelf in a damp unused bedroom. Some of them sat up there for fifteen years without being touched. When I got a mount converter and started trying them out I discovered one long zoom had developed a considerable amount of internal fungus. None of the others had the slightest speck of it.
 
In between almost giving up film photography and respraying myself as a digital photographer I kept my lenses on a shelf in a damp unused bedroom. Some of them sat up there for fifteen years without being touched. When I got a mount converter and started trying them out I discovered one long zoom had developed a considerable amount of internal fungus. None of the others had the slightest speck of it.

h'mm very strange........where you keep lenses is very important as why wasn't there fungus on everything found in Egyptian tombs, well at least it shows they can die if they were present in the first place, so maybe the spores in the lenses, without fungus, just died.
 
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