Squeaky clean

I have suffered through dust on my camera's sensor for many , many months now. I figured that since the pictures I was taking were for my personal use, and not for clients, then a little extra time on photoshop cleaning up dust specks was no big deal. But it got to be time consuming - especially when dealing with large batches of photos, and any image that features a lot of blue sky. So I asked Santa for a cleaning kit for Christmas, and he delivered big time with Delkin's sensor cleaning kit.



I was expecting a box of swabs and special sensor cleaning fluid, but what I got was a black plastic case containing swabs, fluid, a mini-vacuum with a non-shedding brush tip, AND Delkin's sensor-viewing LED-lit magnifying loupe.



I finally sat down last night to find out just how dirty my sensor was, and try to clean it off. Pretty much everything that you hear from camera shops about sensor cleaning boils down to this - do not try it at home. Why? Because if you slip up and scratch your sensor, then you'll either have to send the camera in for sensor replacement, or maybe just scrap it and buy a whole new camera.



Needless to say, I was a bit nervous. Nevertheless, I got my equipment set up, popped a freshly charged battery in my Canon Rebel XT, and set the menu to "sensor cleaning." With a shutter-like sound, the mirror flipped up and the shutter curtain pulled back, revealing the bare sensor. Remember the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the guys look directly into the Ark, and get their faces melted off? That's about what I felt like staring down into my camera body. Then I placed the magnifying loupe in the lens mount and turned on the LED lights. Just as I suspected, the sensor had some significant bits of dust, lint, and debris on it. A little bit of work with the vacuum (which has another LED light on it), and I was ready to use one of the sensor swab sticks to do the final cleaning. A couple drops of fluid, and two light sweeps with the swab left the sensor completely dust-free.

So it was really no big deal to clean it myself. The alterbative was to send it off to Canon, have their "experts" clean it, and shell out about $75 for the service, hoping to have it come back clean. To me, the time without the camera and the $100 once all was said and done makes it a no-brainer decision.

That's it for today. This week I'm going to be working on getting a basic website designed on my iMac. Nothing too fancy - just something to post until I get a site profesisonally designed. I'll also be looking into options for business cards, so I'll let you know what I find that works. So until next time...

Keep your camera with you!