Dust Aid Wand!

One of my pet hates is dust on my sensor! I started this morning with looking at my images from yesterday afternoon and realised very quickly that I had a few dust specs on the sensor. Not a good start to the morning. But then again better to see it sooner rather than later. So I started to get my gear ready for a sensor cleaning. When you are shooting in digital cleaning your sensor is something that unfortunately becomes part of what you have to do. No matter how careful you are to not get dust on your sensor you will. Especially if you at all change between lenses while shooting. I always try not to change my lens outdoors if possible. When I am out on excursions I always try to trek back to the car to change my lens if possible.

It took me about an hour to clean the sensor today. Once I got rid of the original dust I found new dust in other places. Just great!

When I clean my sensor I use the Dust Aid Cleaning Wand together with their Platinum Strips and I swear by it. It is the one thing that I have tried that works very well for me. I have tried other sensor cleaning products as well but this one is what I like the best and it gets the job done for me. I am by no means sponsored by them…. I wish so if anyone that works for Dust Aid reads this please feel free to contact me I do not mind at all. ;-)

The way I do it is I have an image where I see the dust I look at that image to know where on the sensor the dust is so I know where to focus my attention when cleaning it. I then use the Dust Aid Wand on the sensor I feel its very easy to use and I am not afraid that I will hurt my sensor. But if you are nervous about cleaning your own camera sensor by No means do it yourself go to a professional since it can be very nerve wrecking and of course very expensive if anything goes wrong!

As I mentioned it took me just over an hour today to get mine clean this is mostly due to that I do not have a loupe. Using one of them I believe would have quickened the process a lot.

I was looking at one last time I was in London but thought they were a bit too expensive…. Since you don’t use it so often but I have today realised that it is worth the investment in the long run. I could have done a lot of other work in this hour that it took me to clean my sensor. So a loupe is up on my purchase list again!

Since I did not have a loupe I had to take a test shot with the camera every time I had cleaned the sensor and then download it to the computer to check the results. I did this several times in all I took 78 test images.  So you can understand how tedious this process can be without a loupe.

Something that helps me along with my process to make it more enjoyable is listening to some great tunes while you are doing the tedious work.
A good link I found:

http://www.cleaningdigitalcameras.com/inspecting.html

But before you start you might want to rule out that it is not your lens that is dirty.

I just want to say I take no responsibility at all for anyone trying to clean his or her own camera sensor. I just wanted to share with you how I do it.

Happy shooting everyone!

Helen