Photography - Improvised macro lens mould study

I got another lens from a junk bin in a camera store.

This one is a canon f 1.4, 35-80mm zoom.

It has an auto focus motor that makes a sound a bit like you might hear if you put a blender in a blender, but the auto focus still works.

The bits that don't work so well, are the lenses.

The problem is mould inside the lens.

Not uprising for a 500 Yen lens sitting in the junk bin of a camera store in the country that invented humidity.


That's a ridiculously close up shot of the mould.

Ridiculously close up.





I don't have any way of doing macro shots with my new camera, so I had to improvise.

I took the shot of the mould with this home made bit of kit.

The blue lens cloth is there to keep the light out of the improvised macro lens, because the small length of toilet roll acting as an extension tube  isn't light tight.

The lens attached (that's a generous description) to the camera is actually on backwards, and is resting against the other end of the toilet roll tube.

The lens resting on the red kitchen scrubber is the new one with the mould garden inside.



The torch is a torch.

The torch is there because the camera's lens has the aperture set as small as it will go (f36) to try to get at least some of the mould in focus.

I didn't really achieve that.

The exposures were around 30 seconds long (many minutes without the torch), and other people were working in the house at the time. My desk is a wobbly kitchen table top heavy with old CRT computer monitors, and all the other junk I like to keep at hand. As as a result it amplifies any movement from people, traffic, and the fridge and freezer compressors.

If you put a glass of water on a desk like mine and look at the reflection, you will see the reflected image dance all over the place. Normally it isn't a problem, because the camera and lens would both move at the same time, but with this contraption, there was nothing of substance connecting the lens and the camera.

Tricky.

Anyway...

The lens has mould in it.

The image on the left was taken with the canon 18-55mm lens that came with the camera.

The image on the right is taken with the mouldy 35-80mm lens.

The camera was set to the same settings for both shots.



Mould is not a friend of the lens.

The point of all this, is to point out that I wont be taking an angle grinder to my lens in some future post  without reason.

Actually I'll try to open it up and clean it, but there is a fair chance it's bits of glass are coated in a very delicate plastic coating, called coating. If that's the case the mould may have become a permanent fixture by etching it's way into the coated bits.

The mould appears to be on only one element, so I might be able to salvage some other bits and make a proper, mould-free macro lens.



120 Things in 20 years warns that when I say "proper" I mean the improvised macro lens might employ slightly fewer toilet paper tubes, and where they are unavoidable, they might be made a bit less wobbly and light leaky.

Fire - Potato cooker mould

I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later, but my methanol potato cooker has gone mouldy.

That happens to a lot of the truly great inventions.

I think.

Wasn't it Edison that said "Sometimes a perfectly good invention fails only because the potato always goes mouldy."?

I could be wrong.

I never took history.

Aquaponics Unhappy peas

I think my peas are officially unhappy.

They appear to be slowly losing their grip on the business of growing, staying alive, and making me peas.

Interestingly, this leads me to a question I'll be asking but not answering right away, because I'm yet to find out.

There are a few plant diseases that, once your garden contracts them, render your patch useless for that type of plant for some number of years.

It occurs to me that the soil must get infected.

It also occurs to me that I have no idea if the same would apply to growing plants in a media like gravel or scoria.

I'll find out.

Aquaponics - Honeydew

So...

Apparently, aphids eat plant sap, and then for some reason secrete a sticky fluid known as honeydew.

Ants like sticky.

And then I'm told, a black sooty mould follows.

That sounds a lot like what I'm seeing on my strawberries.

Here is a picture of an ant licking some PVC and enjoying some sticky.

120 things in 20 years - not just Aquaponics - Honeydew

Aquaponics - Ants

I have some new and exciting visitors to my system.

Ants.

There sure are a lot of ants when there are ants.

For the last few weeks, there has been something sticky forming on the leaves of the strawberry plants. I'm not sure if its got anything to do with the mould, but it does seem to be on those varieties of strawberry that were also trying their hand at mould farming.

Interestingly the leaves were so sticky that they were forcing aphids to stay longer than they had originally intended when landing on the sticky leaves.

I was going to write a post about how good my strawberry plants were at pretending to be sticky traps, but it turns out, ants ate the dead aphids (you can still see some aphids on the leaf to the left), and now seem to be eating the sticky.

I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Currently, it's just a thing.





I'll be getting a little upset if they run out of leaf sticky and discover that strawberries are chock full of sticky, but until then, like everyone who isn't a caterpillar, a snail or a slug, they will remain welcome.

My only accommodation has been to move the create I sit on over a little to give them room to cut across what used to be my space. They seem very obsessed with maintaining their ant highway along that path, so I moved my create few inches to the left.



Not just Aquaponics - Ants, but also 120 things in 20 years.

Aquaponics - Mould

I hate it when nature takes out the bad day it's having, by taking it out on me, and bringing me grief in the aquaponics system. What have I every done to nature?

Oh yeah...note to self - send "sorry"card to nature re: carbon footprint.

I don't mind so much when things go wrong that are my own fault. Sometimes I take shortcuts in the way I build stuff, so I feel that it's inevitable that it will need some "adjustment" at some stage in it's life.

But mould is a different story.

I mean it's still my fault, but I'd still rather it didn't happen because it's kind of icky.

When I built the new grow house, I didn't bother reinstalling the computer box cooling fan I had hanging from the top, to stir the air within the growhouse.

Opps.

So now I see mould on the PVC strawberry towers.







I have no idea how I'm really meant to spell those two words so this will have to do.

I've decided to spell mould, "mould", because when I made molds I used "mold" already, and I cant really see using "mould" for mold, and "mold" for mould would make that much difference anyway so I'll stick with "mold" for mold, and "mould" for mould.

I wouldn't want to confuse anyone.

It's also growing on the strawberry plants.

And that.

Nature.

Is unacceptable.







When my pH dropped too low, someone who knows stuff, told me they thought my leaves were showing a potassium deficiency. It turns out different minerals are available to the plants in varying degrees depending on how acidic the water is.

Sounds fair.

The solution is, you can adjust your pH by adding shell grit to your grow bed. Shells are made of calcium carbonate, and that raises your pH. The natural process of converting ammonia to nitrate via nitrite cases your system to become acidic over time, so the shell grit acts as a balance. It's convenient as well, because the more acidic your system gets, the more the shell grit gets dissolved. Once the system is no longer too acidic, the shell grit stops dissolving.

The system finds a balance.

In the meantime, as I was waiting for my system to gently come back to a pH of around 7, I added some potassium bicarbonate.

This adds potassium, which was a nice boost for my plants, but it also adjusts pH away from being too acid.

So I bought some Eco-RoseⓇ

It's actually sold as a solution to powdery mildew, and I guess that could be the culprit.


I dont actually know what powdery mildew looks like, and it would only take 5 seconds of my life to search for it, but that would take the mystery out of life.

Either way, the strawberries will enjoy it, so I'll give it a go.




Not just Aquaponics - Mould - 120 things in 20 years