THE THINGS I DO…

If you find that using a blower isn’t doing the trick, it’s time to resort to other methods to remove this dust from your camera’s sensor. When I’m forced to escalate my dust removal techniques, the next step is to pick up my high-tech sensor brush.

The brush I use is made by the Canadian company Visible Dust. It’s called the Arctic Butterfly 724 and works by spinning to generate an anti-static charge across the specially-designed brush that, when slowly pulled across the sensor, picks up the particles and removes them. It has a built-in motor to spin the brush fast enough to charge its “Super Charged Fibers” for effective dust removal. You then immediately brush the sensor (and only the sensor!) and the charged brush attracts the dust to it and lifts it away from the sensor. Easy, right?

  I’ve found this pricey brush to be the answer to 95% of my dust removal needs. My dust removal workflow with the Arctic Butterfly goes like this: activate sensor cleaning function on camera, spin brush for 3 seconds, drag brush (using a light touch) across sensor in one direction only. Repeat as necessary until you’ve brushed the entire sensor. Turn off the sensor cleaning function, remount your lens and return to shooting mode. 

After brush cleaning, shoot another series of test exposures to make sure your sensor is clean. It you’ve still got spots or, even worse, smears, you’re going to have to either send your camera to the factory for more thorough “wet” cleaning or invest more money in a wet cleaning kit to do the job. 

I won’t go into the wet cleaning process here. Instead, I’ll provide an excellent link to a website that covers the subject very thoroughly. This website covers the various wet cleaning techniques and provides a supply list to get you started. Like I said earlier, the combination of the blower and the Arctic Butterfly brush take care of almost all my dust removal needs. The key to successfully using the blower and the brush is to use a light touch. Don’t blast the sensor with the blower or scrub with the brush. A gentle touch is the way to go. I hope my techniques have helped put you on the right path.  Sensor dust removal is an onerous task, but one that everyone will have to do, eventually. Good luck.

Dust on your camera’s imaging sensor can really make a bad day worse. One or two bits of dust clinging where they shouldn’t can mean hours spent removing them in post-production. Face it, regardless of how careful you are changing lenses, dust is a fact of life and will eventually find its way to your sensor. 

Not sure whether dust has found you? Like other life problems, the first step is identifying you have the problem in the first place! Here’s what I do to see how much dust is on my sensor. Take your camera outside, set the aperture to f/16 or f/22 and make a couple exposures at a clear patch of sky with the lens set to 2-3 feet (so you won’t have a sharp photo of the sky).

An example of what your test image will look like.

Open one of those images in your favorite image editing program and enlarge your blurry sky image to 100%. Look for spots. When (note I didn’t say “if” here) you find them, take note of where the dust is before moving on to the next step.

A closer view of the offending dust particles.