These have been some of the most interesting fungal growth patterns I’ve seen. When I received the Olympus Pen FT a few weeks ago, it came to me with the film advance completely stuck and the mirror unable to return to its correct angle. As a result, no light was reflecting onto it and into the prism, and so looking through there wasn’t much apparent debris.
I let it sit for a few weeks as other things in life became priority, but decided to pick it up this afternoon to start to take a look at it. To my surprise, after fiddling with the self-timer lever a bit the camera began to fire. The film advance was incredibly rough, but it did move with some effort and the shutter would also fire with some encouragement. I was quite happy about this, and it did answer some questions* I’d had, but in doing so this revealed an entirely new and arguably worse problem for me.
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These cracks seem to stem from impact damage, and most likely the moisture that was allowed to seep in resulted in extensive fungal growth. As a result, this makes me think camera disassembly will be far more of an exploratory experience rather than ‘get a working camera out of this’ experience, but I’m still quite excited. *Particularly because this answered a question about whether or not enough of the camera was even there to function. The self-timer has what appeared to be tamper marks in and around where it’s located on the top plate, and the flash sync port on the left side was completely gone, which made me think that someone had stripped the camera for parts. However, being able to actually dry fire the camera, even knowing its incredibly rough shape, gives me some hope regarding being able to bring it back to life. I think it’ll be disassembled for a while though if I can actually manage to do that, at least until I can source some kind of replacement prism.