For quite some time I’ve believed that you should NEVER clean the sensor on your DSLR camera. Everything I read seemed to indicate that any attempts to get some of that dust of the inside of the camera would invariably leave the camera broken and useless. Another piece of electronic junk. An iBrick.
When I got back from the Burning Man festival this summer, the cameras were coated with that magical playa pixie dust, inside and out. So I had a problem. I didn’t want to send the camera in for cleaning right away, but I also didn’t want to sully the sensor any more than it already was.
Instead of freaking out, I decided to work with it, and let some of that dust fall into the light.
When you stop a camera down to really tight aperatures (say, f22) the tiny spots of dust on the sensor become very clear and sharp, and you can see them very distinctly on a finished image. This happens because everything from the the edge of the sensor all the way to infinity is in focus when you have the lens stopped down.
At the same time, setting your camera to f22 has another affect. In normal indoor lighting, it means you have to expose the film longer (or sensor) to light for a longer period of time, because less light is actually getting in the camera.
If you are hand holding the camera, that means that there will be a little bit of blur movement from you own body moving, and at the same time, the subject will blur more if they are moving.
I wanted to play with these ideas a little bit in my work. I wanted to find out if what made an image beautiful was really the amount of sharpness and lack of dust…or was it something else?
So I did find that a dust camera could create some interesting an beautiful effects that you just cant get with a clean camera.
And just recently I came across this wonderful article about sensor cleaning on thedigitalpicture.com, and decided to give it a try. It worked fine with both my 20d and my 30d.
So there you have it! If your camera is dusty, there is no need to clean it right away…you might come away with some interesting photos if you use it! On the other hand, if you want to clean the camera yourself, it is possible even though it is often not recommended.
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