I recently listed a lens for sale which had mildew on the rear element. Googling lens mildew wasn't much help. Not even a picture. Well I have a pretty decent picture of my lens and thought I'd share it with you folks. I'm no expert on the subject. But the picture says so much. I'm sure you could come up with a thousand words to describe it like the old saw goes. Here's the picture:

Well by the time I reduced that to fit the ebay bandwidth capability for guides there's not much left of the resolution. You can see the fine matrix that's eating away at the lens.I tried cleaning this with my usual lens cleaner which is all I normally used. For this problem I tried rubbing alcohol and Gojo brand hand cleaner, without the pumice. Without any luck. I then tried Listerine for the Thymol which is arguably a fungicide. You can run a Dogpile search on "Thymol mildew". The third item returned is what I looked at as I write this. Reading that I'm kinda scared of having it in my mouthwash, but hey let's get back to the lens.

Well I wiped a little onto the lens and couldn't see it had much of a result so I wiped a little Listerine on the lens element and let it sit. NOW! I could see some results! The lens got cloudy, Oh gee I thought, I ruined a perfectly lousy lens. Well I cleaned that off with my lens cleaner and now I was back where I started from.

Well I didn't rescue this lens. It is possible that if I removed the element from the lens and soaked it in something that the mildew would come off. But that's beyond my ability. My guess is that this is destroying the coating. It might be possible to remove the coating to get rid of the mildew, but in this case the lens isn't of a quality to make it worth the expenditure.

My intent in writing this is just to share the picture and hopefully we'll all be a little more vigilent in protecting our photo equipment. Don't store your gear were it's humid, like a basement. Don't throw away the little dessicant packages that come with equipment. They belong in your camera bag, and can be rejuvinated in an oven. And when you go from different extremes of temperatures don't open your camera cases. Let them slowly change temperature to the new environment. These precautions can help protect you from mold and mildew.

I don't know what happened to this particular lens. It wasn't my own lens, or one I used. It doesn't look like it was flooded, or if it was, it was professinally cleaned. Over the years I've had two incidents with water and my photo gear. One involved a boat which rolled over. The camera case floated but the equipment got soaked. Nikon cleaned up two of the lenses and I still have them totally useable 30 years later. The other incident involved an upstairs neighbors fire. The lens I remember was a Schneider 135mm Componon S with a shutter. I found the lens hanging from the enlarger, totally filled with water. I disassembled the lens and rinsed it with alcohol. That was the extent of the effort at recovering that lens. All this equipment still works today, even the shutter, and has no mildew.

The boating problem can be minimized with a waterproof camera case. A water proof case is a wise investment for a lot of photo sessions, I'm sure you can come up with your own examples. The fire can be minimzed with insurance.

I spent more time on this than I planned to. I just hope you learned something here. Now get back to eBaying.

If you'd like to see better quality images the listing number was: 280097839623.