Overdue dust cleaning!
by Mark ~ June 25th, 2008. Filed under: Equipment notes, Photo Tips.
My procrastination in cleaning my camera’s sensor finally gave me a kick in the pants with some soft focus iris images I did recently. Check out the thumbnail. These are all the dust spots I needed to clean up in Lightroom. I thought slides were bad! Dust really starts to show when you do images with a lot of soft uniform areas. I probably have some shots that are more detailed with just as many spots, only they aren’t noticeable and blend in with the details.
I am actually fairly religious about keeping lens caps clean, but I think I need to concentrate more on the mating end of the lens to the body. I checked out a few of my lenses and found some dust in there.
What surprised me was the amount of effort to get all of these suckers cleaned off, and I still didn’t get them 100%. All in all- took me about 40 minutes. I started with my simple overpriced paintbrush (ahem - sorry - sensor dust cleaning accessory), didn’t seem to help much. I also have one of those Dust-Aid gizmos. It is a very scary thing at first placing a sticky piece of foam on your camera’s sensor, but it actually works pretty good. Just not good enough for this case. I still had quite a bit, despite using the Dust-Aid 3 times over. I then resorted to a wet cleaning using Pec*Pads and Eclipse cleaning fluid. It took about three tries with this, and another final try with a Dust-Aid - and it is about 95% clean. I always seem to get some Pec*Pad lint somewhere in there, which shows up like a giant worm just crawled into your image.
All the lenses were cleaned and I called it ‘good enough’ for now. No doubt the process will repeat in the near future. If you have any other dust prevention tips or tools you have had good luck with, don’t keep it a secret eh?! I haven’t resorted to buying yet another dust gadget - that spinning paintbrush thingy. I refuse!!
June 25th, 2008 at ?
Nothing beats trying a Rocket Bulb Blower first. Years ago I went to a camera user group meeting here in the bay area and they compared various techniques and showed the results. Surprisingly the Rocket Bulb Blower was able to get almost all the dust off the sensor. There is always a troublesome spec or two that can get left behind and in some instances you can live with them. For the remainder of the time following use of the blower you can then do a wet cleaning. The net result… less particles being relocated during the wet cleaning if they’re not removed.
Something to consider…
June 25th, 2008 at ?
Ah, Jim, thanks - I actually have a Rocket Bulb Blower, but didn’t try it this time. I also noticed that Dust-Aid has discontinued their original sticky finger wand. Makes me even more nervous to use the thing now.
June 25th, 2008 at ?
Hey, Mark. Nothing new to add. I guess that I just go at it with the Pec Pads and Eclipse cleaning solution for my D2x. I usually get a very clean sensor in about 20 minutes or so of trying.
I’ve heard of the Rocket Blub blower, but wonder where all of that blown away dust settles. Things that make you go, Hmmm!
I read that in the D300 and the D3, as they use an ultrasonic shake to clean the sensor, has a little adhesive pad at the bottom of the camera to catch shaken off dust, but no such thing exists for earlier Nikon cameras.
I tried the overpriced sensor brushes and was, to say the least, not at all impressed. It was a complete waste of money.
June 25th, 2008 at ?
Hey Mark,
I just open the camera up and give it a good rinse.
Nah, seriously, I got a blower and a lens pen from NSN and it works great, so far .. definitely works better to keep it up regularly though. You shoulda seen my sensor when I was finishing up 4 months in Chile.
Cheers
Carl
June 26th, 2008 at ?
I figure, get the lens “decently” clean, then just rely on spot removal in software. If you think about it, since dust is impossible to prevent, you’re going to have to go over your photos with spot removal anyway.
June 26th, 2008 at ?
I feel you pain!
Good enough is often the key. I have been down to one spot - went for one more wet cleaning, and ended up with three!
Like Jim, I start with the blower, it can often work.
My new camera has a self cleaning sensor. Time well tell if that feature works, but after 6 months I still haven’t had to clean it.
Ron
June 28th, 2008 at ?
The self-cleaning sensor on my 40D seems to work pretty well. After several months, only a small spot. Meanwhile my 20D has spots all over it, even with blowing it out.
Scott
July 6th, 2008 at ?
I am in the same boat as Scott, my 20D gets constantly dusty and I have take 30+ minutes to remove the spots on some photos where it seemed like every spec of dust showed through. Yet another reason I’ll use to justify upgrading to the new 5D when (or should I say if) it comes out…
July 6th, 2008 at ?
I use the dust blower and it doesnt’ really do any good anymore after a certain point. So my strategy now is, “How do I clone these dust spots as fast as possible?” If the 5D had a dust sensor then I’d be all over it already.
July 7th, 2008 at ?
Self-cleaning sensors are indeed an advantage, the blower bulb comes next on my A700 but once in 6 months I have to resort to sensor-film (http://www.sensorfilm.com) While it first sounds scary to create such a mess on the antialiasing filter in front of the sensor, I found it convincing when testing on a filter and the results excellent when finally applying it to my sony a700’s sensor. Nothing left that would need another run with fresh pads or corner pads or something alike. You might like to give it a try - for me it worked very well.
July 7th, 2008 at ?
Markus, thanks for the reference to sensor film (the URL is sensor-film.com by the way). That is a new one for me. Can’t say I am willing to brush fluid on my sensor yet - but it is amazing what people come up with to address this problem. It also seems rather complicated (drying times, leveling, the warnings in the instructions, etc vs. simply using a blower brush.)