Recently I stumbled upon an older portrait photo of Monika, which I took in January 2018 on the beach in Portugal. It was a sunny day and I wanted to take new portraits of my beautiful wife. Unfortunately my lens had other things in mind.
I started taking the first test shots as I recognized that something is off. The autofocus wasn’t working properly and the first photo I took was totally blurry, as if we were in the middle of fog. I was very confused because in the first minute I couldn’t figure out why.
Then I had a closer look at the front of my lens and I saw this:
Don't PANIC!
Well, that’s easy to say, if I would have known that there’s a solution for that. But in the first seconds I was convinced, that my 2.5k € lens was gone. So I tried not to freak out and find a solution. But what to do? I can’t open up the lens and clean it. No way. So the only thing I came up with was laying it in the sun to dry. And I did. And it worked out without leaving any damage. Puh…
But how did the humidity came inside the lens?
After the shock was gone and I could continue my photo session, I tried to figure out, how the humidity came into the lens. And there’s only one explanation to it: At this time we stayed in a AirBnB in Portugal at the Algarve. And in the winter time it get quite humid after sunset and over night. Sometimes the humidity outside is so high that it is totally foggy and in the morning everything outside is wet.
But not only outside. If the flat doesn’t have a heating, it gets also inside quite moist. And of course I stored my camera bag inside the apartment, but I never would have thought, that the humidity gets into my photo bag into the lens. Crazy, right?
