New Life for an Old Lens

This is a Nikkor 105mm f/2.5 lens which I have owned for 50 years.  It is in mint condition, or was...  I was not careful and had a lot of camera equipment stored in the basement.  Our basement is pretty dry, but...  I have had three of my lenses for my Nikon cameras end up with a fungus growing on the internal glass elements of the lens because of moisture.  I now store my cameras and lenses upstairs in the house where they are much safer in terms of damage.  I have had one of the lenses repaired - they had to change one of the internal elements, which cost a few bucks.  That lens is the 65mm Micro-Nikkor close up lens and it works perfectly now.  This lens, however, is beyond hope.  Or is it?

I have an adaptor for Nikon lenses so that I can use them on my new Sony a7 camera.  So I put the lens on that camera and went out today and did this photograph.  The fungus makes objects that I photograph low contrast and they have kind of a haze around them, which in this case, is an interesting effect.

Here is another photograph in the side garden with the same lens.  The image is much lower in contrast due to the fungus scattering the light.  But I like the effect because the photograph looks like an old, faded color slide, I think!

This is a close-up image THROUGH the Nikkor lens.  It is intentionally dark so that you can see all the fungus growing on the two lens elements.  It is painful to see what bad condition the lens is in, in terms of the internal elements.  On the other hand, it is so old that it is a manual focus lens and I am not sure it will connect properly to my Nikon D-300 digital camera.  But I have found a use for it on my newest camera, the SONY a7.  Of course exposure and focus are manual on that camera as well, but look what I have been able to do by using this lens the old-fashioned way, before autofocus and auto exposure!