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sensor cleaning

Nitecore BB2 – The best fan for your sensor

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When I made the move from Nikon to Sony, dust became an issue for me. I was not only moving from one brand to another but also from a DSLR to a mirrorless system. While my Nikons were not immune to sensor dust, it was never a big issue. I suspect that the mirror protected the sensor from stray particles. With the mirror gone1, dust seemed to be magically attracted to the sensor every time I swapped a lens.

I used to fight dust with a Rocket Blower. But recently, I also started carrying a small Nitecore BlowerBaby BB2 fan. It’s about the same size as the Rocket but can do a bit more. Actually, I like it so much that I think it’s the number one sensor fan in the world2.

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Watch: The best and worst ways to clean your camera sensor

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When I first started shooting DSLRs back in 2002 there were really only two options for cleaning my sensor. Either I had to box everything up, ship it to Nikon, pay like a $80 fee (plus shipping both ways) and in three or four weeks I’d get my camera back with a maybe clean sensor or I had to learn to do it myself. Back then, we didn’t have the array of sensor cleaning tools available today, either. Oh no, we used a sawn-off Wendy’s knife with Pec-Pads and Eclipse fluid!

Now, we have far more options available to us when it comes to cleaning our sensors. But for many photographers, cleaning one’s own sensor can still feel pretty intimidating if you’ve never done it before. So, in this video, Chris Niccolls at DPReview TV shows us several ways to clean our sensors and a few methods we most definitely absolutely shouldn’t be using to clean our sensors!

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The Blower Baby is the world’s first electronic sensor blower using 70km/hr gusts of wind

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The BlowerBaby by Nitecore is the world’s first rechargeable electronic dust blower, designed specifically for camera equipment and delicate electronics.

Designed to fit in the palm of (most) hands, it’s made from aluminium alloy and with what Nitecore describe as HA-III military grade hard-anodized finish.

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How to thoroughly disinfect your camera and workspace

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The coronavirus pandemic has made us wash our hands a gazillion times a day and taught us to (finally) stop touching our faces. But our cameras are in contact with both our faces and our hands. So, it’s important to keep them clean and disinfected, too.

DIYP’s Dave Williams wrote about it in a recent article, and our friends from Lensrentals are sharing a few more tips that you’ll find useful. Other than disinfecting your camera, they also teach you how to do it with your workspace, and make sure to take their advice and keep your gear and space clean.

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How and why to “quaranclean” your your camera gear during the coronavirus pandemic

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I made a silly video a few days ago about cleaning your camera for Covid-19. It really was silly – I washed a camera in a sink full of soapy water. It went down well, but there’s a serious message behind it.

We’ve been given the advice to wash our hands for twenty seconds with warm, soapy water, and to not touch our face. What we need to remember as photographers, is that we bring our camera to our face all the time. It’s imperative that we keep our camera clean to prevent the transmission of this disease.
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Stop making these mistakes when cleaning your camera sensor

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There is more than one way for cleaning your camera sensor. However, it can easily happen that you make some mistakes when cleaning it, which can do your sensor harm in the long run. In this video, Michael The Maven talks about some of the most common mistakes people make. He also teaches you how to fix them, and proposes some effective methods for sensor cleaning.

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This is how they clean camera sensors at the Leica Camera AG service centre

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLTFD2poRTk

Cleaning our sensors at home is a fairly straightforward thing to do. I’ve been doing it since I was shooting with a pair of Nikon D100 bodies back in 2002 because sending your camera off to be cleaned was prohibitively expensive back then. These days, most camera stores will offer some kind of cleaning service.

But how do they do it when you send it back to the manufacturer? Specifically, how does Leica do it? This 20-minute video from Leica Society member Hari Subramanyam lets us see the whole process after he took his Leica M (Typ 240) and Leica SL into Leica Camera AG for a sensor clean.

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This is how you clean your camera sensor and lenses by yourself

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If you listen to the wider DSLR & mirrorless owning community online, cleaning your own sensor is the scariest thing in the world. We’re talking Pennywise, Freddy Krueger, and Jason Voorhees all rolled into one kinds of scary. So, we ship them out or feverishly wait for the next photography show, to take our camera for cleaning.

But, it’s really not all that scary. I’ve been cleaning my own DSLR sensors since 2002. After you do it a couple of times, the worries disappear. In this video, Peter McKinnon talks about his dirty camera issues on his recent trip to Africa. He then walks us through the process to get your sensor clean and sparkly again. He also covers some tips to keep your lenses clean, too.

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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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Save yourself some money and learn how to clean your own sensor like a pro

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Learning to clean your camera’s sensor is one of the most valuable skills a photographer can learn. At least when it comes to camera maintenance. It’s a task that many are afraid to learn, worried that they’ll kill their camera. These things are a lot more solid than most give them credit for.

In this video from f64 Academy, Blake Rudis shows you how spot that you even have a dust problem, and then several ways to get rid of it.

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