I’m so sick of editing dust out of my images, so today I remembered that I hadn’t blown the sensor off in a while.  I have a Canon 20D, so it doesn’t have the auto sensor cleaning option like the 40D, 50D, 7D and 5d mkii have.  You can get a nifty little rockey blower thingy off ebay or your favorite camera retailer ( Giotto’s Rocket Blower ) or you can be ghetto like me, and just use a brand new turkey baster (might even have more blowing power with the large bulb).

Just don’t use it on a turkey first!  Don’t be a dork – buy a brand new one and dedicate it to your DSLR.  If you damage your sensor, it’s because you’re an idiot, not because I told you to use the turkey baster out of your mom’s wet dishwasher strainer.  Cleaning the sensor the right way usually involves eclipse fluid and pec pads or something of that nature, but I’m still a little scared to delve that deep into it.  Afraid I might screw it up, so for now – this is good.  Check out how much dust I was able to remove in just the first round of blowing.  I set the aperture to F36 and shot the white ceiling so we could see the dust.

Results:

BEFORE

AFTER

I didn’t get it all, but at least I got rid of 50% of it.  Thanks to my friend Hon for suggesting that I mount my camera and point it downward first, so that when I blow the sensor the dust has the chance to fall out of the camera body, instead of just blowing around inside of it.  That was an excellent idea.

Tags: diy, sensor cleaning

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 1:39 PM and is filed under Photography, Photography Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.