5 Crucial Camera Cleaning Mistakes

These are some of the most common mistakes people make when cleaning their cameras.

Try to avoid all these – and only use professional equipment for cleaning, and your camera will last much longer. If you’re unsure of how to clean your camera you can always take it into a local shop and have them do it for you.

Forgetting to activate the camera’s sensor cleaning
Modern SLRs and a compact system cameras have a cleaning mechanism that vibrates either a filter above the sensor or the sensor itself to shake loose particles of dust or hair. These can be very effective at preventing marks in images provided the system is activated. Some cameras allow you to specify when the cleaning takes place – as the camera is turned on or off, or both.

Cleaning in the wrong environment

Some professional cleaning services do the work a dust-proof booth with an extractor running to keep the air clean, but this is somewhat impractical and unnecessary at home. Don’t clean the sensor when you’re outside, for example, or immediately after you’ve vacuumed the carpet or dusted the china because there’s likely to be lots of dust flying around. The bathroom can be a good cleaning venue just after the shower has been running as the steam helps drag dust out of the air.

Breathing on the sensor
When you’ve taken the lens off your camera and spotted a spec of dust on the sensor it’s tempting to use your mouth to blow onto the sensor to remove an obvious spec of dust. However, this propels tiny droplets of saliva onto the sensor, creating a whole new raft of marks that need to be cleaned off. Use a dedicated cleaner or bulb blower that’s specifically designed for the job instead.

Blowing dust around
Provided they are specifically designed for sensor cleaning, bulb blowers and the like are very useful for blasting loose dust off a sensor quickly, but there’s a danger that the dust is just sent into orbit around the inside of the camera, ready to settle back down again. The chance of this can be reduce by holding the camera with the lens mount facing down while you blow on the sensor.

Neglecting the rear element of lenses/viewfinder/mirror
As well as cleaning the body of your camera, the sensor and the front element of lenses, remember to take a good look at more hidden areas like the rear element of the lens, the mirror of an SLR and the viewfinder. These areas can get dusty and dirty and while any dust on the mirror or in the viewfinder won’t spoil an image it can spoil the view and (in the case of the mirror) may drift onto the sensor.

Read the full article over at Digital Camera World.

Source: Digital Camera World