Fortunately dust on my camera sensors hasn't been a major problem with my DSLR's - and so I've just put off worrying about it. With all of the hype, complexity, nay sayers on the web, and even many suggestions that satisfaction has not always been a result when sending back to the manufacturer for cleaning - - - I have rediculously even considered that it is easier to just buy a new camera when my sensor becomes unbearably dirty to where I have to spend time on every frame cleaning up the spots.
At least early this spring I did end up becoming aware of what sensor dust looked like on my image files. That was major irritation and a relief in some ways because it wasn't what I expected it to look like (I have spent most of my career brush spotting white dust marks off of my traditional prints). My heavily used and abused Nikon D70s provided my first sensor dusted images for me. While dust was probably there for some time, it wasn't until I did a commerical event shoot where I was using the D70 along with my 85mm 1.8 shooting wide open for natural light. The background was predominately solid light blue painted walls. When I got home and unloaded the image files to my computer, I was forced to realise the work that would be involved in cloning and spotting many large and small gray blobs scattered across each and every image. It was the last time I used that camera. I was well aware that it was still a perfectly capable camera though and so gave it to my son for his non critical use.
Well I have a commercial event shoot tomorrow for an awards ceremony in Toronto with many prominant Canadian politicians , sports celebrities, and business leaders will be in attandance and some receiving awards - their will also be entertainment. Even though the venue will have many press photographers and reporters there to interview and take pictures of the attendees - - - I have been hired as the official photographer to document all of the happenings of the evening. As a result I needed an extra camera body so that I could be well equipped without having to change lenses, shoot flash and natural light, etc.
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That brings me to the Sensor cleaning. I was really hoping I could get away with using my sons D70 but did not realize how irritating the dust blobs were until he showed me some natural light shots he had taken last week and pointed out the gray spots of the mother and babies faces. I got home with the camera a couple of hours ago at 7:00PM. What a time to have to do all of the research necessary to find out what I should use to clean and whether it would even be feasable to do so - or whether any home grown methods would work. Along with that I had none of the specialty tools, swabs, or liquids that were the most highly recommended. My first effort was to use a camel hair lens brush and bulb blower to wisk off the dust. When I followed up with a test shot, I found that I now had ten times the dust spots and problems to deal with.
And then I came upon a couple of websites that mentioned that they have had very good success using Scotch Magic Tape and some sort of non-metalic burnisher to flatten the tape onto the sensor. Well when I checked my rolls of scotch tape, they were of the high stick type - and so I headed out for the 20 minute drive to Walmart (the only place open this late). When I got home, I went at it and 2 or 3 minutes later shot a follow up test shot to find the previous dust blotches all but gone.
Here is a before and after shot - using my 85mm 1.8 wide open on as plain a wall as I have available (while not the type of scene recommended in websites for seeing the dust, it's all I had to work with). While the dust was plainly visible in the shot that came out of the camera, I converted to black and white and pumped up the contrast equally on both pictures, to the extreme for the sake of comparison:
The method for the Nikon D70 was:
* Charge battery fully
* Take lens off camera body
* In MENU select Mirror Up and then hit the shutter release to cick the mirror out of the way
* I took a strip of about 6 inches of tape and turned the ends over in each other so that there would be tabs in order to pull the tape off of the sensor
* I uses the rounded plastic end of one of my retouching brushes to gently rub the tape onto every part of the sensor - startingfrom the center and working out
* using the tape tabs, I removed the tape from the sensor
* I turned off the camera power to release the mirror so that it closed--------
For years I have used magic tape directly on my negatives and for taping paper masks to my negatives. Because of its low level of stickiness, it never left any residue on my negatives or other sensitive materials. Because of my personal experience with the Scotch Magic Tape (GREEN PACKAGE), I had no problems trusting using it in this type of application - - - but you may want to check into the safety of it further before trying it on your own cameras. I have no idea whether it is a recommended method or one that will cause issues down the road with build up on sensors. For that matter the plastic instrument I have used to flatten out the tape onto the sensor and the amount of pressure and motion that I used will be different that what others would use. While my quick research revealed that sensors aren't near as fragile as one is lead to believe - - - - I would do my own research and not depend on anything I have stated when working on your own camera investement.
All I can tell you is that this Scotch Magic Tape methods has worked extremely well in eliminating the dust off of my dirty D70 sensor. I hope this information is also valuable to others who have the same concerns as I did this evening.
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Here are a couple of links to get you going on researching this method:
http://www.dpchallenge.com/forum.php?actio...HREAD_ID=254457http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp...essage=13015113