Sensor Cleaning

Recently I started to see artifacts in my images which indicated to me that it was time to clean the sensor. Matt Klaskowski did a great segment in episode 29 of the D town TV podcast where he talks you thorough the cleaning process step by step which really helped me out.

I used the Arctic Butterfly by Visible Dust for dry cleaning and then Ultra MXD-100 green sensor swabs 1.6* to fit my canon 50D's sensor together with VDust Plus solution which seemed to work pretty well.

I won't go into detail about how to clean your sensor as I think this is explained pretty well on the link but from my experience, it took me 4 swabs until my sensor was clean and after going over the sensor with 3 different swabs with no significant improvement I decided to bend the rules a little and adopted a scrubbing type method from top to bottom and applied a little more pressure. This seemed to work pretty well and after doing some test shots on a white background at ISO 100 @ f22 I can see that my sensor is now spotless .... and so are my images.

I also borrowed a Rocket blower from a friend which I used to remove the dust from my mirror and from the focusing screen. I still see some specks of dust when I look through the viewfinder but these do not show on my images so I can live with that.

Here is the link to the D town TV podcast http://kelbytv.com/dtowntv episode 29 shows the sensor cleaning method but there is loads of great info available in all the episodes. Whereas in previous series D town has been a predominately Nikon show, it has now become much more general and is including some Canon segment's too so if you havn't already done so, check it out!