a blog by Peter Leonard
I've have my Canon 10D since May 2003 -- more than three years, which is kind of shocking. In the first year alone, it travelled with me to Germany, Denmark, Russia, Sweden, France, and Amsterdam. I've also taken it to Nevada and Utah nearly every year, sometimes twice.
The desert, especially, is a rough environment for cameras. This shot required changing the lens to a zoom with a cloud of dust still surrounding our car, which had screeched to a halt:
(Check out the unfortunately accurate EXIF timestamp at the bottom.)
An open camera means the CMOS sensor eventually accumulate bits of dust on its protective glass plate. You can see this best if you shoot a white wall at f/22 with the focus purposefully set wrong:
This looks worse than it actually is -- in reality, any in-focus detail would overwhelm the small dust particles and you'd never notice them. Only in large areas of single color (sky, for example) would you need to use Photoshop to stamp them out. Here's a picture from Mt. Rainier this January -- the dust spot is at the far right, just above the horizon:
There are a number of methods you can use to remove DSLR dust particles, ranging from simple air pressure to brushes and even mini-squeegees. Many people are very worried about attempting a cleaning, since if you bork the sensor you've essentially killed the heart of the camera. My friend Sándor has a Rocket Air Blaster, which looks like a refugee from a 1950s comic book. I gave the Rocket a cursory try when we were in Utah, but the dark hotel room wasn't exactly the best place to gauge sucess. Now that I'm home, I set aside an entire evening to the task.
Earlier this week I bought a synthetic (nylon) artist's brust at the UW Bookstore -- which incidently has an amazing selection of art supplies. Nylon acquires a static charge when air is pushed through it, so that plus a can of compressed air was all the tools I needed. For the actual cleaning, I followed the excellent instructions on Petteri Sulonen's photo website -- every single article has is insightful and worth a read, especially his lens reviews. Why do these Finns speak such good English, anyway?
Picture of Helsinki in homage to Petteri
I'm only slightly embarassed to say I followed all of Petteri's obsessive-compulsive recommendations, up to and including the cold running shower to suck the dust out of the bathroom before I began. Here's what the sensor looked like before any cleaning:
After a nerve-wracking few minutes, trying not to let muscle spasms jab a $5 paintbrush through a $1,500 CMOS, I achieved nearly perfect results:
This is the point where the evening began to resemble a turn on Let's Make a Deal: do I go away satisfied with my winning a reasonbly-clean sensor, or risk it all on what's behind the curtain? Except here, behind the curtain is either a really clean sensor, or an enforced upgrade to the Canon 30D.
Luckily, I got the Hawaii Vacation Courtesy of Holliday Inn rather than a goat:
I'm already contemplating just how many months I can go never changing the 50mm prime lens, so that no dust creeps in to sully my pristine sensor...