Dirty, dirty stuff

Richard Charpentier Canon Cameras, Notes from Rich, Photography 3 Comments

Hmmmm…….  What to blog about?

I received a comment on my blog today that said, “Enough Already with the photography.”  I’m not quite sure about that one.

Oh yeah, now I remember what I wanted to blog about.  Photography!

Specifically, dirty sensors.  See, I received my Arctic Butterfly last week, and today I sat down and gave it a whirl.  Pretty interesting results!

camera-1There was a point this afternoon where I said to myself, “Good lord, you’ve destroyed your image sensor.  Looks like you’ll have to get that 5D Mark II after all!”  Seriously, it was touch and go for a while.  Not because I messed up.  Rather it was due to the fact that I live in an extremely dusty state, and every time I go out there seems to be wind, dust, and flying dust bunnies running along side tumble weeds.  All of those things got into my camera and I didn’t even know it!

On the first pass with the butterfly I figured I’d done well.  Popped the lens back on, stepped outside, narrowed the aperture and took a few shots of the sky and clouds.  After my little photo session I came back inside and popped my CF card in to see how my cleaning went……

It went horribly!  Apparently there was a lot of dust on my sensor, and I moved it around!  A big long black blob showed up along the bottom of each photo.

I repeated the cleaning routine 4 additional times.  I’m now down to one odd dust bunny still showing up in long exposure narrow apeture photos.  I’ll adress it tomorrow.  Very close to declaring the 40D’s image sensory “clean.”  I knew we had dust, but good grief!

Tomorrow I figure I’ll finish the cleaning and then focus my attention on the 30D.  See, I tested it today too.  Really narrow aperture longer exposure…….and there was more dust spotting in the sky than there was sky.

Knew I’d been dust spotting a lot lately in Photoshop…..

Well, off to ponder more blog posts about photography, or at least posting in a round about way about photography……..  😛

Comments 3

  1. Anyone who hasn’t been to the Ian Russell gallery is missing out, and I’m serious. It’s probably the most fun and interesting gallery I’ve visited. And Rich’s photos are stunning. He’s way beyond “on his way”!
    (Rich: now will you clean my camera with the butterfly?!! =)

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  3. Aha! Bribery works! But I was sincere with my comments about the gallery and your photos. Inspiring!

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