On Wed, May 26, 2010 16:17, Tim Corio wrote: > My trusty Canon 5D has turned against me! > > There's a few spots in each image that I think are dirt on the sensor. > To confirm they are on the sensor I shot way out of focus against a > white background (set at both max and min distance) with two different > lenses. The same spots show up in the same place on the photo. That does sound like dust. The canonical check is to shoot the blue sky, stopped well down (makes the dust shadows clearer). Doesn't matter much whether it's in focus or not, since it's an issue of shadows cast by the dust. > How should I clean the sensor? Should I do it myself or is this tricky > enough to have it done professionally? Can anyone recommend someplace > around Rochester, NY to do the work? First step is try a blower. Do NOT use a can of compressed air here, use a Rocket blower or equivalent (large powerful rubber squeeze-blower). The air comes out at room temperature and there's no danger of liquid escaping as there is with cans. If that's not good enough, then the next step is some sort of "contact" cleaning (something actually touches the sensor). Probably millions of people have done this themselves by now; I've done it about three times myself (and really need to get wider swabs to do it on my current camera, which needs it). Bunches of people are still nervous about it, too. My advice is, use one of the big mainstream cleaning products; either swabs and fluid, or one of the tacky sheets. And use it meticulously in accordance with the instructions. And then I think there's very very little chance of doing any damage. But when they say things like "use each swab only once" they really really mean it. Also my advice: Do learn to do it yourself. You're probably going to need to do this fairly frequently (depending on where and what you shoot), and you won't want your camera away for a week or two for cleaning that often. Might as well start now, your future cameras will be even more expensive :-) . -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
