Re: how often do you clean your lens?

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Crazy but good to know!

the most wonderful things in life aren't things 

On Jan 23, 2011, at 11:18 PM, Karl Shah-Jenner <shahjen@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I was just sent the link below and thought it worth passing on .
 
Harping on about when I lectured again, I would often find students grumbling about the lenses in the photo store (we lent out camera kits), blaming them for their fuzzy images or the white spots on their prints.  More oft than not it was their poor efforts at focusing their enlargers or rough handling of negs  - but they'd decline to see it.  If I had the time, I'd whip off a print to show them their neg was in fact fine, their lens fine, and they'd be better off spending time paying attention to their lecturer in the darkroom classes, try to focus the enlarger and maybe occasionally store their negs somewhere other than the bottom of their bag .. If I had less time I'd wave a cat lens at them and ask them if they thought the big black circle in the front of the lens would degrade the image quality <blank stares>. 
 
Sometimes I'd demonstrate (less dramatically than the link below) that since nothing in the optical pathway was in focus, the gunk they saw on their negs, film, scans, prints or whatever was more a consequence of mistreatment of the negatives than anything relating to the lens - and I showed this by sticking a piece of electrical tape across a lens - white demonstrated a general lowering of contrast - black showed basically a reduction in light levels .. and I tried to tell  them THAT was why you fixed deep scratches in a lens by painting them black !  =)

A decent box lens hood could almost eliminate the net effect of a piece of white tape..  and overall, a lens hood went a lot further to preserving maximum contrast and sharpness than giving the lens a good clean ever did ;)

 

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