Sensor cleaning

April 6th, 2011 Leave a comment Go to comments

A while back, returning home from a sunset shoot, I spotted dust in the middle of my photo’s. Uh-oh. I’m a bit of a McGyver, so I decided to try to clean it myself. After browsing the internet and several photoforums, I chose for the old wadding stick-and-water technique. Let me tell you, I nearly died doing this…

Do NOT try this at home kids!
First, make sure your workplace is as dustfree as you can get it. After that, chase off all your cats and dogs. You will need some wadding sticks and some clean water. A big tank of auxilliary transpiration fluid, because it will form a running stream down your back…

Images 1 shows you the amount of dust I found on my sensor.

As you can see in the borders, I used different Apertures and Shutterspeeds to make the dust more visible. (Set the Aperture to it’s maximum will reveal your dust) Blowing out the dust wasn’t an option anymore as you can see. For starters, I looked up where I could find the “clean sensor” bit in the Canon EOS 20D menu. This function locks the mirror, so you can reach the sensor itself. (which is positioned right under the mirror.)

I dipped the first stick in the water and dried it a bit, to the point where it was moist. Shaking a bit, I tried to make steady sweeps. First from left to right, then from top to bottom. Following the moist stick, I now used a dry one and repeated the sweeping.

I now had come to the point where the dust wasn’t visible to the eye anymore. Boy… did the testpictures show me otherwise!

This is horrible! The first image is taken with an aperture of 5.6, the second one is at it’s maximum of 36. By now I I really needed the big tank of auxilliary transpiration fluid! I decided that I would repeat the wet and dry sweeping. Twice.

And finally, having started at 7:17PM, at 7:47PM it was over. Fortunately it ended the way it should have. The sensor was clean.