Sensor, clean ?......opinions

Attached is an image taken on my 1DSMK II today. I cleaned the sensor yesterday using the Visible Dust product "Artic Butterfly"
I have never used any liquids or any other cleaning product full stop. Upon examination of this file do you think I am missing something or is this result as good as it gets.
This body has about 70,000 shutter actuations.

(sorry, forgot the attachment, it is in the next message)

Thanks,

Paul

Here is the image.

I wish I could get my sensor that clean! I see no dust bunnies here ;-)

Never Cleaned Mine

Well, the only cleaning that I have done was with the Rocket Blower. The one time the dust was so terrible, I was stupid enough to change lenses on a hike. Went to Canon in Irvine and let them clean it while I waited. They had me out in an hour and took the focus screen off to clean it too. Better than new.

I am a chicken about doing a wet clean, but then I am close enough to go down to Canon in Irvine to let them do it!

Sorry Paul
Not that good!
First you should have shot the image at ƒ22
And then look at it after an auto level in CS, like this (yes this is your image!)



I would feel more concerned about the residues on the outer space than the few spots around...

Hey Nicolas,

hmm...that is interesting. Wonder what that is all about. Is that what the fluids are for , to clean that muck off ?
Thing is though, I don't seem to have any effect on my images. Should it, am I missing something. To use an example, look at my photos in the thread "latest magazine ad " (layback cafe) I am unable to see any major deficiency.
I am wondering if what I am seeing is the effect of shooting the plastic on the light box.
Any thoughts ?
Actually, in the 5 minutes since I posted this I have shot a few more frames and don't get anything like that (not on the light box)
Cheers,

Paul

BTW the pic that Nick is showing you, that is the mess that the Artic Butterfly leaves behind, swirls all that chamber grease around the parameters of the sensor

Nick???
which image do you mean?

Michael Fontana said:

Nick???
which image do you mean?

Click to expand...

Mine just a liitle above...

I have to agree with Antony.

I use since its do exists Eclipse Fluid but with home made patula with Pec Pad
,
sometimes it is a real pain, but I always achieve to have perfectly cleaned sensor before important shoot.
I used once the
cleaning chamber kit
and now I have no more that grease Anthony is talking about.

Time to time, when there is ONLY dust, I use artic butterfly, if your chamber is cleaned, this can be OK...

I always test, shooting the sky at ƒ22 and do an auto level in CS...

Nicolas Claris said:

Mine just a liitle above...

I have to agree with Antony.

I use since its do exists Eclipse Fluid but with home made patula with Pec Pad

,
sometimes it is a real pain, but I always achieve to have perfectly cleaned sensor before important shoot.
I used once the
cleaning chamber kit
and now I have no more that grease Anthony is talking about.

Time to time, when there is ONLY dust, I use artic butterfly, if your chamber is cleaned, this can be OK...

I always test, shooting the sky at ƒ22 and do an auto level in CS...

Click to expand...

ah so you've a new nick-name ;-)

Thanks for pointing out when archtic butterfly shouldn't be used...

BTW: using your sharpen-action selectivly, aka with a layermask for photos that will be printed in B &W only, the customer still wanting the color ones. The action pops the tones...

Michael Fontana said:

BTW: using your sharpen-action selectivly, aka with a layermask for photos that will be printed in B &W only, the customer still wanting the color ones. The action pops the tones...

Click to expand...

Yep and an easy Nickname isn't it?

It's the World upside down!
Asher! I've done something good for B&W!
Me! I just can't believe that!

LOL

However, thanks Michael to point this out, if it can be of any help... I'll be happy though B&W is not really my cup of tea ;-)

It's true, Nicolas ;-) marvelous action....
Check it out yourself, on a screenie from a architecture model shot. The model is about 120 x 120 cm, the houses are about 5 cm in height; not easy....
As this is from a architecture competition, I can't show the rest...

Well, thanks Michael, but I was a bit dissapointed aftre trying, so I came back to your original image and just did an auto level with opacity set at 50%...



We should stop there or move to another place, we're completely OT!

Well, autolevel makes the shadows way to strong! - on the rest of the image...

Good show Mikey can you believe some people actually call me Tony. If your offended that i called you Nick, Nicolas i apologize. We can count on one thing, if anyone ever does it again we can rely on Mikey to be on top of it.
If i offended anyone by not calling them their first name, it was meant to be as a sign of friendship, not malice. Thanks for the invite to the site, was fun for awhile, Good Luck with your board!

Regards,
Tony, oh i mean Anthony Arkadia

No problem at all Anthony!

Greetings from Saint-Tropez...

Antony,
I didn't intended to make a fool out of you, but I wasn't sure - as Nikolai Sklobovsky sometimes is called "Nik" - to which picture you were refering.

Okay, then I made the PON with nickname and Nick, which wasn't derected against anybody, but a moment of humour.

Feel free to go to the boards you like the best.

Best wishes, Michael

To Paul Bestwick

Hi Paul:

Somebody else noted you should be stopped down to the fullest extent possible and the comment is right on. I disagree about the additional PP to "enhance" the dust bunnies. IMO shooting a cyan sky with my widest lens fully stopped down at the proper exposure for the sky is good enough; if I don't see the dust set against a properly exposed sky background the sensor is CLEAN (from my perspective).

I use Pec Pads, a spatula of the proper size (from the Copperhill guy), and Eclipse solution; this setup does the "wet cleaning" job for me. For dry cleaning (i.e. hand held blower) I use a rectal syringe purchased from Walgreen's Pharmacy - please don't laugh, it is a big bulb that moves a lot of air AND it starts life clean as a whistle because of the intended application. By "clean as a whistle" I mean as delivered to the pharmacy there is no debris inside the rectal syringe bulb that will add more garbage on the sensor than you are trying to blow off.

Now here is the interesting thing about dust/dirt/lint/FOD accumulating on the sensor. From my experience it appears to be more a function of the camera body than the conditions under which a lens change is made. I have three bodies, 10D, 30D, and 1DmkII. I have not had a full year of experience with the 30D so I will withhold comment on that body.

Okay, the 10D is wonderful. If and when I see the rare dust bunny on my 10D the hand held blower does the job and the camera STAYS clean for "long" periods of time (note, I rarely change lenses to minimize opportunity for dust bunnies).

My 1DmkII is a real PITA; it always gets dirty and no amount of hand blower action will clean the sensor. I ALWAYS have to wet clean that body to get it completely clean (and I mean completely). Now, on occasion, after about four or five shots following a perfect cleaning job (i.e. zero spots) a dust bunny in the form of lint debris (probably from a Pec pad) may appear and the hand blower will remove this easily. Now for some really bad news - within one week of shooting and "without removing the lens" some "difficult" dust bunnies will appear on the sensor. By difficult I mean they require a wet cleaning, nothing else will work. One thing I've noticed about the "difficult" spots is they are very small compared to what I will call typical dust bunnies. I think, but I'm not absolutely sure, the difficult spots are the result of some sort of "dry" lubricant flying around from the combined motions of the shutter and mirror (BTW, I always reserve the right to be wrong). I suspect the "dry" lubricant, if that is what it really is, may be coming off the shutter mechanism or mirror hinge (actually I shouldn't guess because I really have no clue) and once removed, the air moving around from the mirror flopping around at 8+ frames per second is enough to move small mountains in the form of dust bunnies past the shutter and all around the sensor chamber area.

Please keep in mind my own experience does not "necessarily" mean or even imply that 10D bodies are better than 1DmkII bodies from the standpoint of FOD accumulating on the sensor. OBTW, FOD stands for "foreign object debris". Anyway, when I shared my experience with another photographer friend his experience did not track mine at all. My friend told me his 10D was a dust magnet and very difficult to clean while his 20D was a real charm. I'm sharing this information to make to make you (any other readers) aware that dust/FOD issues "may" in fact be a function of "camera to camera" variations rather than "model to model".

Normally I don't get bummed out over garbage on my sensor because it is easy to clean (i.e. even the wet cleaning, a relative PITA compared to dry cleaning, is still a simple operation). However, I was once on a one month trip to shoot Arches and Canyonlands National Parks and wouldn't you know it but I forgot to pack my sensor cleaning box (I keep everything to do with sensor cleaning in one small box). To make matters worse I didn't clean the 1DmkII before I left thinking a sensor cleaning job would be the first thing I do once I get into town. Well, I came back home with about 30 GB worth of dusty skies and needless to say I wasn't happy with Canon, my gear, or myself for screwing up in the first place.

After my sad experience at Arches (which was pretty much my own fault) I can sympathize with some folks out there that are unhappy with the sensor dust situation and Canon's lack of attention. I don't think Canon can actually do anything about it, not today and not tomorrow - IMO dust will be with digital forever. What I expect from Canon is to inform and educate the user public regarding how to best clean the sensor "on our own" BECAUSE the hand blower does not work for most folks. Sending a camera to Canon for cleaning every month is not an option (even if the cleaning was performed at no cost); this is not an option "not" because shipping and receiving a clean body is an expensive PITA, but because even Canon can't clean the sensor all that well.

So, now you have my rather long take on sensor FOD and cleaning.

Regards,

Joe Kurkjian

Joseph A. Kurkjian said:

... What I expect from Canon is to inform and educate the user public regarding how to best clean the sensor "on our own" BECAUSE the hand blower does not work for most folks. Sending a camera to Canon for cleaning every month is not an option (even if the cleaning was performed at no cost); this is not an option "not" because shipping and receiving a clean body is an expensive PITA, but because even Canon can't clean the sensor all that well.

Click to expand...

Hi Joseph
with its new website, Canon Europe does inform:
Here

Partial quote (introduction):

Hairs, out of focus blobs and small specks of dust dotting your pristine blue skies – these are all things that your client does not want to see.

Dust on negatives and transparencies has always been an issue, but the advent of digital capture has bought it to the fore as one of the most irritating by-products of the modern photographic age.

Sensor dust can be a big deal, but some simple tools can deal with the problem effectively making hours with the cloning and spotting tool once again a thing of the past.

The term ‘dust’ is a generic term for a range of sensor contaminants from atmospheric particles through to animal hairs; particles of dried lubricant; plastic from body caps and, most significantly, shavings of brass from the lens mount.

These contaminants affect not the sensor itself, but the low pass filter that covers the sensor on all Canon DSLR cameras.



Electron microscope image of contaminant sticking to the sensor glass.
To deal with these various problems there is a range of solutions.

Preventative strategies
Before dealing with methods of cleaning, it is worth mentioning a few ways of avoiding the problem in the first place.

When changing lenses, always turn the camera off to ensure the sensor is not ‘charged’.
Replace camera body caps with the later, non-shiny type - they are less prone to generate dust in the camera. All new cameras from the new Mk III / Mk IIN / 5D / 30D / 400D onwards have been supplied with these as standard.
Keep the camera internals clean – Dry/Wet DSLR sensor cleaning.

Solutions

.......... .......... ..........

Click to expand...

It is not necessarily appropriate to go straight from blower to wet cleaning. The sensor is charged and that attracts dust and also imposes a charge on the dust. Even when the sensor is off the dust may have residual charge attracting it to the sensor. A blower won't always dislodge this dust but a simple wipe with a charged brush that attracts the dust can do wonders. So can a lens pen for that matter.

Any application of fluid is at least as likely to leave a mess as any other method. All cleaning methods will leave a mess if misused.

Check out the sensor scope for seeing exactly what is on the sensor, and where, without mucking around with test photos. Then you'll know what part(s) to clean.

There's also a new system that uses low-tack adhesive pads to pick up the dust from the sensor. I can't recall what it is called but it is quite new and not readily available yet.

I disagree, that is plenty clean. If you have to do auto levels and bring the contrast up that high to reveal spots they will never appear in real world photos. Pixel peeping like that rarely shows up in prints.

Nicolas Claris said:

Sorry Paul
Not that good!
First you should have shot the image at ƒ22
And then look at it after an auto level in CS, like this (yes this is your image!)



I would feel more concerned about the residues on the outer space than the few spots around...

Click to expand...

Pawel Woj said:

I disagree, that is plenty clean. If you have to do auto levels and bring the contrast up that high to reveal spots they will never appear in real world photos. Pixel peeping like that rarely shows up in prints.

Click to expand...

Hi Pawel,

My greetings to you. Yes it seems like pixel-peeping, to quote a Riechmanism, but remember, we do not really know how we will be using the file down the road. For myself, I find that from nowhere spots appear when I have resused files taken some time ago and brought out hidden spots when doing needed adjustments for the new purpose..

I generally shoot as large an aperture as possible for people and then when I need an architectural shot those dust spots appear since I have been lax in cleaning. Most times the location of the spots mean that repsair is trivial. However, not always.

So, in general we should be cleaning more often. I don't do that! I just get away with it and then every so often, I am very very sorry for doing so.

Asher

despite intentions to the contrary this forum will no doubt take on all the qualities of a camera club.
Lots of measurements & microscopic examinations. Not to say that there will not be useful & interesting information. I have actually picked up some very helpful info here. Come to think of it, I am very much looking forward to reading various test results on the MKIII now that it is becoming widely available.
I am definitely with Pawel on this one.......pixel peeping.......yea. To repeat the point I made, for all practical intent & purposes, these spots are just not visible. They dont exist. And unlike the majority of the "pixel peepers", I actually derive my entire living out of selling my images.

Cheers,

PB

IMO when looking at the Auto-levelled example.. except for perhaps the dust bunnies that become obvious, I would ignore the comments about the outside "residue".. I strongly suspect that all this really is posterization of the rgb channels, accomplished by way overstretching the range of levels available in an 8-bit jpeg via extreme levels adjustment.

my $.02

Hey John,

sounds very believable to me. I was a bit dubious about the "residue" comment. I make some large images & they are beautiful, way better then what I used to get out of my Hasselblad. If the image sensor had that type of issue it would have to translate to the final print & would surely be evident in particularly big prints.

Cheers,

Paul

Don't change lenses with your camera turned ON !!

Don't change lenses with your camera turned on mate !!

I made that mistake, and I live to regret it. I ended up buying a sensor cleaning kit, with a little vacuum cleaner and swabs, which worked reasonably well. It also has a sensor scope with it, so you can see every speck of dust on the sensor.... great tool actually.

Even so, I am still never able to get it perfectly clean.