Smudges

[jwjohnson]

[font color=\'#000000\']The way to tell if this is stuff on your sensor is to stop the lens down to the smallest aperature it has.  Then take a properly exposed image of the sky or a light colored wall.  Set the focus way off, so nothing in your image will be in focus.  Examine the resulting images at 100% or 50% in your image editing software.  If there is dust or dirt on the sensor it will be nearly in focus.  There should be nothing else in the frame.  If you've got just a vague blur in the same area in each frame it also is likely on the sensor.  The cleaning process described should help all of those problems.[/font]

[Eli]

[font color=\'#000000\']I read MR's guide to sensor cleaning and it was very helpful.  I've got the proper equipment on order.  But I was wondering if what I have is really an issue with sensor dust or not.

There are a few smudges on my pictures.  I shot a blank wall at the widest angle and at telephoto and the smudges were in the same spot on each which leads me to believe that these are sensor issues.  However, everyone seems to mention dust as small specs, and I'm wondering if it's possible to have smudges that are actually quite big.  I only have one lens, but I have taken it off a couple of times.

Any ideas would be appreciated.  Thanks![/font]

[Ray]

[font color=\'#000000\']Yeah! I've got blobs on my D60 images which do not look like dust and do not respond to blow cleaning. They're only a problem on light areas such as sky where I use the clone tool to remove them. It's not a great problem but sometimes I wonder if I should send the camera in for a service and clean-up.[/font]