Dust on the sensor - how to tell when it needs a clean · May 29, 11:56 PM by Simon Mackie
If you’re anything like me, you’ll be a little paranoid about getting dust on the sensor of your DSLR. Unfortunately, dust is an issue with DSLRs – it gets into the camera when you change lenses.
Here’s a simple technique to see how dusty your sensor is:
- Take a photo of a clear sky or other blank subject at f22
- Open the picture up Photoshop and run Auto-levels
You may end up with an image that looks something like this:
It’s worth noting that even though this looks pretty bad, you can’t really see the dust on any of my normal photos. When my sensor gets this dirty, I usually give it a clean. I use a Hurricane Blower to gently blow the dust of the sensor. Refer to your user manual for details of how to do this.
After cleaning, my sensor looks like this:
It’s not spotless, but much better than before, and makes me feel a bit happier.
I’d only consider paying for professional cleaning or using another method (such as the Copperhill method) if there’s lots of dust that refuses to shift.
To mimimize the amount of dust that gets into your camera, try to avoid changing lenses in dusty environments, keep the camera body pointing downwards while changing lenses (to encourage dust to fall out of the camera rather than into it), and make sure the camera is switched off while changing lenses.
commenting closed for this article
Download, print out, cut out and assemble your own pinhole camera! Intel-based Macs and Adobe CS2 - a marriage not made in heaven?