The other day, I was taking pictures of a scene with my plastic-fantastic Pentax 50mm f1.8 lens, when I noticed that when I looked through the viewfinder the scene seemed sort of cloudy. I figured it was flare from the sun, or maybe haze in the atmosphere so I kept shooting.
I did take a peek at the front of the lens and it looked fine to me ? When I got home that afternoon, I downloaded the pictures and most of them had this hazy/crazy look to them. I was sort of surprised, because if I remember correctly, it was a clear day with no fog or anything.
I tried increasing the Contrast in Photoshop on a couple of the pictures and it did help somewhat, but something was not quite right ? I then began taking pictures indoors under tungsten lighting with the same lens to test it and that is when my meter started giving me some wild readings. No matter how much I boosted the ISO the meter kept telling me that I was under-exposed. I kept seeing a flashing "f22" in my viewfinder and on the front LCD even though I had the aperture set to f1.8. My ISO was at 64000.
That's when I realized that there must be something wrong with the lens ! I took the lens off the camera and that's when I noticed that there was a huge greasy finger-print on the back of the lens. I quickly got my non-static cloth and carefully cleaned the finger-print off the lens. I then attached the lens back on the camera(K5-IIs) and now my meter readings were normal 1/800 @ f1.8. I was relieved I did not have to buy another lens, but to tell you the truth I'm not sure how that finger print got there in the first place...
Originally posted by hjoseph7 
Similar Threads 
