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5 easy top tips for keeping your lenses clean

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Getting dust and muck on your lenses is just a fact of life. There’s pretty much nothing we can do to escape it in the real world. But, there are things we can do to help reduce its impact. And, there’s also things we can do to safely get rid of it once it’s there. When you’re out on location, wiping it on your t-shirt is an option that many take, but it’s not really healthy for your lens.

This video from YouTuber Fangs shows us five tips for caring for our lenses properly. Both how to get rid of dust and dirt on our lenses, but also helping to prevent it from building up so quickly. Keeping our lenses clean falls under general gear maintenance.

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How to eliminate sensor dust in Adobe Lightroom

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The transition from film to digital eliminated problems that plagued many photographers. Things like reciprocity failure were now a thing of the past. But, it presented a few new challenges, too. The biggest of those is dust. Things have gotten better over the years. We’ve made the shift from CCD to CMOS sensors, which seem to attract less dust. We’ve got automatic dust cleaning features in most DSLRs now, too.

These days, I’ve found the majority of dust can be gotten rid of with a good blast or two from a rocket blower. It’s rare I have to take a swab to a sensor any more. Sometimes, though, you get those stubborn bits that just don’t seem to shift, and you don’t have time to send it off or clean it properly. They’re fairly easy to fix in post, though. This video from Sleeklens shows you how to quickly and easily remove sensor dust in Lightroom.

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This is what Burning Man playa dust will do to your camera [horror story]

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Burning man is probably one of the best places in the world to get some exciting photos going. Sadly, not without a price.

Roger Cicala of LensRental tells that after each Burning Man festival he s faced with the task of cleaning (and sometimes scraping) the gear  that came back from the Playa. It is not that the cameras are getting sand in them. They are getting dust. And lots of it. If you’ve ever been to Burning Man, you know how all encompassing the Playa can be. And by all encompassing, I mean getting everywhere.

Sadly, everywhere also means inside your camera. Even an hermetically, weather sealed camera would need an occasional card replacement and battery swap. (I think you would know better than to change lenses). But most cameras are not hermetically sealed, and they take some damage.

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How to pack and use photography gear to survive a burning man festival

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I created the video “WE ARE MIDBURN” because I have always been fascinated by the culture and the people that belong to the Burning Man community. Midburn is a regional Burning man event held over for a period of 5 days in the Israeli desert. After buying my tickets to the most recent MidBurn this past June, I knew that I had to capture the magic of it all on camera. Despite the enchantment of the event, I knew filming it would bring along its share of challenges.

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Here are a few tips for keeping sand off your sensor while shooting at the beach

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If there’s one thing I’ve learned about shooting on a beach, it’s that sand gets everywhere. No matter what camera bag the gear is in or how well it’s taken care of, sand will inevitably end up everywhere.

Despite this, there’s one place sand should never be, regardless of where else it might magically appear…on a camera’s sensor.[Read More…]

How To Create Three Dimensional Space In Your Composites

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Hey, just a really quick gloss over the basics of how to create three dimensional space in your composites.

I’m going to show you how to take your image from a boring 2D image like this, and turn it into a totally awesome 3D one like this (slide to see the impact of going the 3D and depth route)

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How To Throw Flour At A Model While Keeping the Studio Clean (Hint, by Cheating)

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You know those photos where you throw flour or pigments at models? I know you do, because we just featured some the other day. While those are a lot of fun to make, dealing with flour on the floor is definitely not an easy task. Benjamin von Wong who did this a few years back said it took a few hours to clean.

Well, we got smart and did it in Photoshop :) Not as fun, but definitely faster and easier and no post-shoot-cleaning. We used premade dust from out dust II package which has a large collection of high res dust

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Using Color Balance to turn Dust And Particles into Fire, Ice And Magic

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Time to dust up on your Color Balance Adjustment Layer. Here’s a quick Photoshop trick that will add some more magic (or magical fire and ice) to your composites.

This technique works wonders using dust particles shot against a back background. You can shoot this yourself or use a pre-made dust resource if you don’t have the energies to vacuum all the mess such a shoot creates.

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